Zooey Deschanel, Winter Passing

As a favorite of kids for her singing and dancing with Will Ferrell in Elf, Zooey Deschanel has made her way in movies both funny and serious with a distinctive, sometimes loopy sense of timing and a hipster's downtown sensibility. This spring she has been seen to advantage in two films that couldn't be more different. In Winter Passing, playwright Adam Rapp's low-budget directorial debut, she shines as an East Villager struggling to make a living as an actress who returns to her Upper Peninsula Michigan home to confront her reclusive, world-famous novelist father (Ed Harris, very much in a J.D. Salinger mode - and quite coincidentally: Deschanel was named after Salinger's Franny and Zooey). In contrast to this self-destructive daughter, Deschanel won raves and stole scenes playing Sarah Jessica Parker's mockingbird-harassed roommate in Failure to Launch. The daughter of legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Passion of the Christ), Zooey's sister Emily is also an actress.

•