Bob Mondello

Box-office figures were gloomy in 2014, but movie critic Bob Mondello still found a lot to cheer about among the year's quirky offerings — and as usual, his annual 10-best list runneth over.

Our movie critic reviews The Interview: He says it's not a political satire, or even satire of tabloid journalism. It's just another bromance, with jokes so bad he calls them "freshmanic."

Critic Bob Mondello reviews Selma, Ava DuVernay's film chronicling Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic voting-rights march in 1965. Mondello notes that recent protests make the film resonate today.

Critic Bob Mondello says Mike Leigh's earthy new biopic about the famed British painter J.M.W Turner shows viewers the incandescent beauty of the world as Turner himself must have seen it.

As an African-American Annie arrives on movie screens, critic Bob Mondello looks at other cross-cultural reinventions, from Pearl Bailey's Dolly to the Americanization of Carmen as Carmen Jones.

Bob Mondello reviews Paul Thomas Anderson's private-eye caper, Inherent Vice, based on the bestseller by Thomas Pynchon.

As part of the 50 Great Teachers series, NPR's Bob Mondello looks at what Hollywood has taught us about teachers.

Zhou Yongkang, a senior Communist Party official who retired in 2012, has been under investigation for bribery for months.

New Yorkers talk about the Eric Garner case, other cases of police brutality, and how these divisive issues affect their sense of self and of citizenship.

Bob Mondello listened to reports about spacecraft Philae landing on comet 67P, and it reminded him of certain movies.

Bob Mondello offers a selective preview of what Hollywood has in store for the holidays. There are musicals, there are biopics, and the seas literally will part.

Nichols, perhaps best known for his 1967 classic film, The Graduate, won Emmy, Oscar, Tony and Grammy awards. He died Wednesday at age 83.

NPR film critic Bob Mondello reviews two serious films based on real-life events — Foxcatcher, which stars comedian Steve Carrell, and Rosewater, directed by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart.

NPR film critic Bob Mondello gets blinded by science this week at the movies, what with The Theory of Everything, Interstellar, Big Hero 6 and some really cool black holes.

NPR film critic Bob Mondello reviews Viva la Libertà, a lightweight Italian election comedy that might provide even Democrats with a smile this week.

For Halloween, NPR movie critic Bob Mondello remembers scaring up some frights from his first job at a movie theater.

NPR film critic Bob Mondello reviews Listen Up Philip and Force Majeure — two movies, he says, with compelling lead men who are impossible to empathize with.

NPR film critic Bob Mondello says Birdman is an entertainingly complicated jigsaw puzzle — in both storytelling and technique.

NPR's Bob Mondello says David Fincher's screen adaptation of the marriage-in-trouble thriller Gone Girl offers all the twists and jolts of the original novel, but gets a little pulpy toward the end.

Coal miners and gay activists — two groups that, in 1980s England at least, you might have figured would steer clear of each other — partner surprisingly effectively in the real-life story that's affectionately fictionalized in Pride.

Matthew Warchus' dramedy, which elicited cheers from the crowds at the Toronto International ...