Linda Holmes

Sports movies were powerful once. In the '80s and '90s, there were hits about football, baseball, basketball, hockey, boxing, karate – and they were movies about teams and players and coaches, not scouts and executives.

Things seem to have taken a turn. Moneyball, which received a Best Picture nomination, is ...

Sundance has been making strides in scripted television with series like Rectify and Top Of The Lake, but Friday night also brings back a charming little interview show they have — sort of a perfect Friday night show, actually.

The Writers' Room, hosted by Jim Rash (a screenwriter who's also ...

First things first: It's hard to figure out exactly how to talk about the BBC America series Orphan Black in any way that's remotely meaningful without revealing at least the premise, which takes a couple of episodes to develop in the first season. So while we — including Petra Mayer ...

Heaven Is for Real has an earnestness and an inertness that make it something of a bulletproof fish in a barrel. It's easy to take shots at because it's utterly artless and corny, but it's immune to criticism because it's not intended to be otherwise. It's simply intended to be ...

Transcendence is a science fiction story, but it's very much about faith. Early on, a member of a "neo-Luddite" group confronts Will Caster (Johnny Depp) about his work. Caster is promising a future in which a massive artificial intelligence will contain more knowledge than the world has ever collectively possessed, ...

A friend of mine grumbled on Facebook recently about the phenomenon of people moaning in despair over April's weather. There's often a cold snap around this time, she pointed out. There's often unpleasant rain. There's often unpredictability.

It's true, of course. The delicate dance of when to put away the ...

The Ken Burns documentary The Address, premiering on most PBS stations Tuesday night, opens at the Greenwood School in Vermont, where students are being introduced to a longstanding tradition: studying the Gettysburg Address until they can recite it from memory in front of a large audience of students, staff and ...

[This piece discusses the plot of both the Alice Munro short story on which Hateship Loveship is based and the film itself, although it's frankly nothing you can't intuit from the trailer.]

The Alice Munro short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" begins with a plain and awkward woman named ...

Imagine a scene in which a man is sitting on a park bench reading a book. A woman comes up and sits beside him. He looks up at her. She hands him a letter. "It's over," she says.

If you were to see this scene in a film, completely out ...

This week's show opens on a wistful note for us: our pal Trey Graham, a founding member of the PCHH family, has taken his leave from NPR, and thus from us. He checks in with a message about his plans, we all thank him for his profound effects on our ...

Telling a story about forgiveness in the presence of love is easy. Telling a story about forgiveness in the absence of love is hard.

Forgiveness in the presence of love is done all the time — it's every story about relationships broken by mistakes, repaired by apologies and righted by ...

Most Americans and Germans agree: More trade between the United States and the European Union would be a good idea.

But when you get down to details of a possible trade pact, suspicions pop up, according to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in association with ...

If you've spent much time in movie theaters recently, particularly if you've watched any blockbusters, you've probably sat through three or four or eight trailers that blur into a noisy, explode-y, car-flippy, bombastic 16- or 17-minute assault.

Consider, for instance, the trailer for Pacific Rim. It gets louder and louder ...

On this week's show, Matt Thompson sits in as we talk about Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Were we overwhelmed? Underwhelmed? Merely whelmed? How hard can I get myself thinking about the shots out the window of the Triskelion? (The answer to that last one is: entirely too hard, I ...

David Letterman's announcement on Thursday that he would be retiring from the late-night perch he's held in one form or another since 1982 was, in one sense, no surprise. He's 67, this possibility has rumbled around before, and he's outlasted his nemesis, Jay Leno, whose Tonight Show — the gig ...

It might have seemed like an unsurprising thing to do when Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy took three entire days off to tend to his newborn child, but if you listen to sports commentary, you know that it was not without controversy.

Mike Francesa said on his WFAN ...