Bob Mondello

After years of #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsSoMale, industry observers are crowing over the 2021 nominations. This expanded diversity comes along with increased social consciousness in the year's films.

Most awards seasons find film fans seeking out Best Picture nominees in the runup to the telecast, with the eventual winner reaping millions of additional dollars. But this year's bounce is a thud.

It's been a catastrophic 12 months for movie theaters. It has also been a banner year for diversity at the Oscars — but it's going to take some work to make it permanent.

With the closing of 300 screens, Hollywood laments the loss of the iconic Cinerama Dome; it opened in 1963 with the premiere of Stanley Kramer's wide-screen comedy It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

The effect of so much institutional hatred within the military of South Africa in the early '80s was to leave a generation traumatized, the film concludes.

After a year spent battling a tiny virus you can't see, audiences may well appreciate a title bout featuring antagonists of a certain size — as Godzilla and Kong finally get their playdate.

An updated recording of Anyone Can Whistle, a now-celebrated musical by composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, has some surprises, even for the completist.

A young writer gets a clerical job with the book agent representing J.D. Salinger in My Salinger Year, a movie based on the memoir by Joanna Rakoff.

An elderly pensioner, played by Anthony Hopkins, refuses all assistance, to the distress of his daughter, played by Olivia Colman, in the dementia drama The Father.

Chloe Zhao's tale of a widow (played by Frances McDormand) who is reduced to living in her van after the Great Recession, is regarded as a front-runner for this year's Academy Awards.

A family of Korean immigrants resettles in Arkansas in the Sundance favorite and Golden Globe nominee, Minari.

A worldwide plague of memory loss caused by a virus impacts the lives of a young couple in the film Little Fish. It was completed before COVID-19, but the project got many pandemic particulars right.

Denzel Washington and Rami Malek are on the trail of a serial killer in The Little Things. Written and directed by John Lee Hancock, the film draws from a script Hancock wrote nearly 30 years ago.

Tom Cole, senior editor on NPR's Arts Desk, is retiring after 33 years of shepherding thousands of arts pieces to broadcast. NPR bids him farewell.

Over 11 million Americans have now received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Our colleauge Bob Mondello joined them, and sent back an aural postcard.

NPR's Bob Mondello is back from his vaccination appointment and feeling safer.

This year was quite bad for most movie theaters — but not bad at all for movies. NPR discusses what 2020 was like for the movie industry.

Regina King's directorial film debut, One Night in Miami, envisions a 1964 gathering of boxer Cassius Clay, activist Malcolm X, fullback Jim Brown and singer Sam Cooke.

Tom Hanks travels from town to town in the Texas frontier a few years after the Civil War, reading newspapers to settlers. When he comes across a young girl who was kidnapped, his life changes.

August Wilson's award-winning play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, about a recording session in 1927 Chicago, comes to the screen with Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman in his final role.