Charity appears to be the new black among celebrities, or so suggests the cover story in this week’s edition—the “Money Issue”—of The New York Times Magazine. On the cover are actress Natalie Portman and Martha Villaseñor Antunez, a Mexican businesswoman Portman supports through her pet philanthropy, microfinancing. (Portman works with FINCA International to give poor populations worldwide access to credit.)

The article chronicles celebrity charity from trendsetters like Oprah and Bono, to those better known for antiwar diatribes like George Clooney, down to smaller fries like NFL quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, as these folks clue in to (a) the actual need or (b) the fact that it takes a feat to get attention in the 24/7 modern milieu of celebrity life—or (c) a combo of both. The Times story is one of several lately to remark on the trend.

“Most celebrities no longer have charities; they have causes,” the story says. A publicist in the article adds that celebrities now need “something for People magazine to shoot . . . You can’t just get $20 million a picture; you’ve got to serve turkey to the poor, too.” In the age of TMZ and Perez Hilton, the E! Channel and swarming paparazzi, stars stand out through public action. They “have to do something with all that attention.” As Portman tells the Times, “If they’re going to follow me around and take pictures, I’d rather talk about [microfinancing] than what dress I’m wearing or who I’m dating or whatever nonsense people care about.”

One of the biggest celebrity newsmakers of 2008 is Oprah Winfrey, for hosting “The Big Give”—her primetime reality-game-show event on ABC in which contestants give away large lump sums of cash. More than 15 million Americas tuned in the first week. (The $300 million Oprah has given to charity makes her America’s most generous black celebrity in history, according to Business Week.)

Actress Drew Barrymore also appeared last week on—what else?—“Oprah” to donate $1 million to the U.N.’s World Food Program, which had recently announced that skyrocketing energy costs and spiked consumer demand in developing countries brought commodity prices up by 40 percent in half a year. Talking about how “this has changed my life,” Barrymore noted her seven-figure donation is by far the largest she’s ever made. “Nothing,” she admitted, “has ever felt so good.” In January, Bill Gates, who will trade Microsoft for full-time philanthropy by July, began advocating market forces (what he calls “creative capitalism”) to alleviate poverty. For a while, there were even reports that Paris Hilton was planning to tour Rwanda once she got out of jail. The Red Cross and Oxfam now both employ celebrity-outreach directors to get more of them involved.

Hollywood’s philanthropy fad, while hardly representative of a majority of actors in west L.A., much less Americans, does make for an interesting contrast next to the giving patterns in U.S. churches, which were once the nation’s font for charity but now seem to be moving the opposite direction of Hollywood as they report bottom-scraping lows for giving. The average church member now gives 2.6 percent of his income, yet the (growing) yearly disposable income of just the nation’s 100 million evangelicals tops out at $850 billion.

Author Ronald Sider points out that if less than 1 percent of this amount went to provide microloans, it would raise the standard of living for the world’s poorest 1 billion people by 50 percent in one year.

In 1533, King Henry VIII (Eric Bana) divorced his wife, Queen Catherine, and married a young girl in his court named Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman). Historians still debate the influence Anne and her family had in the king’s decision… did they orchestrate the divorce? Was the King of England a pawn to Boleyn ambition, or was Anne attempting to gain some control over a situation that had been disastrous for so many girls before her?

One girl in particular served as example of the fate a monarchical mistress could expect: Mary, Anne’s sister, The Other Boleyn Girl. In most Henry VIII biographies, Mary (Scarlett Johansson) gets little more than a line designating her the sexual conquest who came after Bessie Blount and before her sister. Phillipa Gregory, however, uses Mary as a character study, exploring these historical proceedings through the lens of this forgotten sister.

The movie dramatizes Phillipa Gregory’s bestselling novel, adhering to the plot admirably considering the reduction of a 600 page novel to a 2 hour movie. Mary’s perspective affords a fascinating glimpse into the sexual politics surrounding Tudor women, but this necessarily truncates the larger historical perspective. The dissolution of the Catholic Church in favor of the Church of England (the largest outcome of the divorce) occurs so swiftly that the audience may miss it altogether.

A warning: while rated PG-13, the subject matter of this film is entirely adult in nature. These historical figures exemplify the dark nature of passion. Expect prostitution, adultery, rape and incest, not romance. The cinematography reflects the subject matter, showing us historical events through a dim, often obscured lens. Expect a film dark in subject and color, reflective of the history it portrays. Want more history? Try two film classics: Anne of the Thousand Days and A Man for All Seasons.