By G. ALLEN JOHNSON, San Francisco Chronicle

Filed under the category "You Can't Go Home Again," Al Attles, the coach of the Golden State Warriors' lone championship team, once found himself back at his alma mater, Weequahic High School in Newark, N.J.

As tall and radiant as you'd imagine her, Uma Thurman enters the conference room at the offices of the California Film Institute in San Rafael, Calif., and makes a beeline for the snack spread.

Michael Sheen has played Tony Blair and David Frost, but his latest incarnation of a British historical figure suggests a path the actor's life could have taken.

With a wife and 5-month-old in Los Angeles and a career in overdrive, Patton Oswalt was sitting in the lobby of a hotel sipping hot tea and ruing the fact that he was in San Francisco for less than 24 hours, and it was strictly business -- he was doing a standup comedy show.

It sounds like a cliche, but it's true -- at 45, Juliette Binoche is becoming rejuvenated by her hometown of Paris. The City of Light is once again her city of life.

In the past month, Kevin Spacey turned 50 and his latest film, "Shrink," a comedy drama about a Hollywood psychiatrist whose personal problems rival those of his celebrity clients, opened in theaters.

So this is Francis Ford Coppola at 70, relaxing on his front porch on his estate in California's wine country. He seems so serene and, yes, youthful that it is impossible to discern the director portrayed in "Hearts of Darkness," his wife Eleanor's documentary of a harried, manic filmmaker on the out-of-control set of "Apocalypse Now."

If you even remember Jack Soo, most likely you picture the rumpled, unmade-bed of a desk cop on the old sitcom "Barney Miller."
What you might not realize is that he was a multitalented entertainer who spent time in a Japanese internment camp and cut a dashing figure as a nightclub singer whose voice, some say, rivaled Sinatra's.

Every so often, a small film out of Ireland becomes a sensation on the international art-house circuit -- "Once," "Intermission," "The Magdalene Sisters." And the operative word is "small."