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Jeffrey Blitz's new film Rocket Science is a partly autobiographical coming-of-age tale about a teenager who joins the high school debate team. Blitz also directed 2002's Oscar-nominated spelling bee documentary Spellbound.

Sweetly smutty Superbad is all about raunch; Brit-farce Death at a Funeral is all about stiff-upper-lip reserve. Both push the envelope, and even the English one has little to do with propriety.

Late salsa star Hector Lavoe was, perhaps, largely unknown to mainstream American music lovers. But the new film El Cantante starring Hollywood couple Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, brings his story to the big screen. NPR's Felix Contreras talks about the movie, and the life of Hector Lavoe.

Many of the 350,000 Latina girls turning 15 this year will celebrate with a bash called the "quinceanera." It's a rite of passage, and a growing industry in the U.S. Julia Alvarez, author of Once Upon a Quinceanera, shares aspects of the ceremonies with Renee Montagne.

Matt Weiner, a TV writer and producer who landed an Emmy and a Writers Guild Award for his work on HBO's The Sopranos, has created a new show. It's an AMC drama series called Mad Men, set in the fiercely competitive world of Madison Avenue ad execs in 1960s New York.

The HBO series Big Love, now in its second season, centers on a man and his three wives, who've broken from the mainstream Mormon church and still practice polygamy. Olsen and Scheffer co-created the series; this year, they won a Writer's Guild Award for their work.

Fresh Air's TV critic reviews two new cable shows featuring strong female leads: TNT's Saving Grace, starring Holly Hunter as a troubled detective, and the FX channel's Damages, starring Glenn Close as a powerful and ruthless attorney.

Al Jean knows Marge, Homer, Bart and the gang better than almost anyone. He's executive producer and writer for The Simpsons, and he's been with the show since it began. He says the new Simpsons movie is about "what happens when a man doesn't listen to his wife."

Three actors continue a discussion on their traveling production that is raising eyebrows and generating lots of laughs.

You know too well where Hollywood would take a story about a stutterer who joins the debate team to get a girl. But writer-director Jeffrey Blitz is a Hollywood outsider, and he's going someplace else — into quirky, indie-flick social satire.