
Sacha Baron Cohen may be the main attraction of The Dictator, but don't be surprised if everyone who sees the movie comes out raving about his co-star Jason Mantzoukas. Best known as the outrageous Rafi on the FX series The League, the Upright Citizens Brigade-trained comic actor steals almost every scene he's in as Nadal, a nuclear scientist that runs afoul of Cohen's dictator, General Aladeen, in their home country of Wadiya only to emerge as his equal when the tyrant is stripped of his identity and let loose on the streets of New York. On a recent press pit stop in Manhattan, Mantzoukas spoke with us about testing his improvising skills against Cohen, what scenes didn't make it into The Dictator and why he hopes that Rafi never gets his own spin-off series.

You wouldn't normally expect to see Martin Scorsese listed as the director of an adaptation of a popular children's book. But that's one of the many delightfully strange things about Hugo, a lavish adaptation of Brian Selznick's best-selling period novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, in which a young orphan living in a Parisian train station unwitting befriends the pioneering silent filmmaker, George Méliès. The cast and crew of Hugo appeared at a press conference in New York recently to talk about their involvement in bringing Scorsese's vision for the film to life.