Bob Mondello

Oscar, Emmy, and Tony-winning actress Maggie Smith played everything from wistful ingenues in Shakespeare to Harry Potter's Prof. McGonagall and the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey.

In the new stunt-crammed romcom The Fall Guy, Ryan Gosling is a stuntman, and Emily Blunt is both his ex and his director.

A young single dad is on a mission in the film Nowhere Special. With a terminal illness and no family to turn to, he's searching for the perfect adoptive family for his four-year-old son.

Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor star in Luca Guadagnino's Challengers, a romantic, tennis-centered screwball dramedy.

A gently poetic coming-of-age story, We Grown Now chronicles an adolescent friendship in Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project in the early 1990s.

Alex Garland's dystopian thriller Civil War depicts a current-day, less-than-united states of America in which journalists are scrambling to get to the White House before rebel factions do.

Dev Patel's feature directing debut Monkey Man, and what may be Ken Loach's swan song, The Old Oak, offer two views of people doing the right thing in combatting hatred and corruption.

The victim of a gay-bashing encounters his attacker months later, and embarks on a dangerous game in the revenge thriller Femme.

Kristen Stewart stars in a lesbian thriller/romance. The genre-shredding film takes place in rural New Mexico in 1989.

The first film in an animated Spider-Verse trilogy won an Oscar in 2018. The latest installment, Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse, will be a strong contender to repeat that accomplishment.

Dune: Part Two picks up Frank Herbert's epic Dune saga in mid-rebellion, with Timothee Chalamet's Paul Atreides finally getting to ride a giant sandworm and taste the Water of Life.

Paul Giamatti plays a 1970s prep-school teacher reluctantly supervising students with nowhere to go for the Christmas holidays in Alexander Payne's dramedy, The Holdovers.

Jeffrey Wright plays a frustrated author who writes an preposterously stereotypical "Black" book as a joke, only to have it become a bestseller in the comedy American Fiction.

The biopic Bob Marley: One Love stars Kingsley Ben Adir as the Jamaican singer/songwriter who became the world's most celebrated reggae musician.

"The Teachers' Lounge", Germany's Oscar nominee for Best International Feature, looks at tensions in a middle school while implicating wider social forces.

With nominations for the Academy Awards finally announced, NPR critics Bob Mondello and Linda Holmes discuss the frontrunners, favorites and snubs among the contenders.

Nominations for the 96th Academy Awards will be announced Tuesday morning in Beverly Hills. Awards season has already provided some guidance about the favorites.

After three consecutive years of box office gains, the film industry expects revenues to be sharply down in 2024. The reason: aftereffects of the strikes by writers and actors.

Superhero fatigue, Barbenheimer, Taylor Swift — 2023 was a year when Hollywood's rulebook flew out the window.

Bob Mondello's 10-Best list always runneth over, and despite writers' and actors' strikes, this year is no exception. Here are the films he was most excited about in 2023.