Linda Holmes

"When brothers start getting a little money, stuff starts getting a little weird."

That's one of the opening lines of the pilot of ABC's Black-ish, which follows the Johnson family, led by ad executive Andre (Anthony Anderson, whose line that is) and doctor Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), who live with ...

In the wake of the premiere of Fox's Red Band Society, there's been lots of talk — not unreasonably — about how it's just The Fault In Our Stars crossed with Glee, which it sort of is, and about how it's just a variation on what I've heard called "sick ...

The problem with being slow on the draw with your fall TV picks is that there aren't so many recommend-able new shows that you can make an entire B-team out of them. Yesterday's post from NPR's Eric Deggans named most of the shows I would have named on ...

I saw Shonda Rhimes at a panel presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour this summer where she helped introduce How to Get Away with Murder, the new ABC drama she helps produce but did not create. I found her pleasantly (and a little amusingly) transparent in not loving ...

Ordinariness is a quality in movies that likely bothers critics and enthusiasts more than it does other people. The more films you see, the more the enemy becomes not just poor quality but familiarity, simply because even an inoffensive cliche becomes a cinematic earworm after a while — something that ...

We've had a lively summer on PCHH, full of live events and quizzes and special guests and even Stephen hosting episodes (!) (kidding!), but this week, we've got our pal Bob Mondello in the studio for some good old-fashioned movie and TV chatter.

Bob and I recently returned from the ...

When Fox presented its new drama Red Band Society to critics over the summer, creator Margaret Nagle stressed that it was not a derivative of any particular story of sick teenagers that has perhaps permeated the culture in the last five years. Instead, it was inspired by the ...

[This post contains information about where main characters stand relative to each other at the opening of the new seasons of The Mindy Project and New Girl. Be advised.]

Fox's Tuesday comedy hour of New Girl and The Mindy Project is made up of two shows by and about women ...

Well, it's that time again: Monday night brings the premiere of the 19th season — NINETEENTH SEASON — of ABC's Dancing With The Stars, a show that has had some ratings struggles in recent years but has managed to keep on plugging for ... well, 19 seasons. That's 19 seasons ...

Perhaps the most static conversation in American culture is the one about its constant decline. Today's music, today's actors, today's movies, today's media, today's food, today's habits, today's language — it's all going to hell, all of it, and it's taking us with it, no matter when today is.

Well, ...

Cake: Jennifer Aniston plays Claire, a woman we first meet as she's shocking her chronic pain support group with her barbed reactions to the recent suicide of a group member named Nina. Claire's face and body are crisscrossed with scars, and she moves uncomfortably at every moment — which is ...

Steve Carell is not unrecognizable in Foxcatcher, from director Bennett Miller (who also made Moneyball and Capote) but it's instantly clear that his transformation is meant to be substantial. Carell plays the very rich and very strange (and very real) John du Pont, who in 1996 killed Dave Schultz (played ...

The Toronto International Film Festival, the largest film festival in North America, is in full swing. Movie critic Bob Mondello and Monkey See blogger Linda Holmes talk about some of the highlights so far.

Beyond the Lights: Gina Prince-Bythewood wrote and directed the terrific 2000 romance Love & Basketball, and here, she looks at the intersection of love and celebrity. Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a rapidly rising pop star whose hard-driving mother (Minnie Driver) has been pushing her hard all her life. Career-wise, she's ...

Men, Women & Children: If you can't get enough alarmist local news segments about how all the kids are sexting and everyone is giving up their families for free online pornography that's infected with malware, you'll love Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children, a cautionary tale about fighting the real ...

The idea of a James Franco-directed adaptation of William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury sounds like the setup for a bit on Funny Or Die, or maybe for the thing you'd have someone mention offhand in our satire about Hollywood. Franco does so many different things that he's ...

Critics all have our idiosyncratic ways of handling the scheduling of a film festival like Toronto. There are planners, improvisers, pragmatists and poll-takers, all counting on some combination of research, serendipity, instinct, word of mouth and logistics to put them in the right rooms at the right times to see ...

It's that time again, and by "that time," I mean "Canadian time." Because beginning Thursday, NPR's own Bob Mondello and I, along with Bilal Qureshi of All Things Considered,, will be spending a week seeing movies at the Toronto International Film Festival, which your movie-nerd friends call "TIFF."

I

Last week, we brought you the first half of the live show we recently held at the Bell House in Brooklyn, featuring producer emeritus Mike Katzif and a conversation about what we'll take away from this summer and what's to come this fall. This week, we have the ...

Lifetime's new show Girlfriend Intervention is not subtle about its message. Its premise is four black women giving a makeover to a white woman on the theory that, as they put it, "Trapped inside of every white girl is a strong black woman ready to bust out."

They don't even ...