Linda Holmes

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 ...

A genre film – one about superheroes, for instance – holds certain variables constant and allows others to change. The visual style can move, the dialogue style can move, and the force to be battled can move: what fans of Buffy The Vampire Slayer call the "Big Bad."

But in ...

[WARNING: If you haven't seen the series finale of How I Met Your Mother, don't watch it. Just kidding! Sort of. This piece, at any rate, contains plot details from that finale.]

When How I Met Your Mother premiered in the fall of 2005, it was sandwiched between The King ...

[What follows is a personal reflection. Please indulge me.]

I felt a little strange when I learned that NBC Universal, which purchased the recap site Television Without Pity in 2007, was closing it on April 4. On the one hand, I quit in 2008, so it's been years since I ...

In the first-ever episode of the Australian series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, the central figure, Phryne Fisher, has to explain to her young, extremely Catholic new maid Dot what exactly is in the round, plastic case that Dot is holding in her hands. "Family planning," she says casually.

Phryne (pronounced ...

Archie Panjabi is part of the cast of CBS's The Good Wife, which has spent much of this week hearing an earful about a major plot development on last Sunday's episode. (They discuss her feelings about the reaction, but do not specify what the development was.)

But on Saturday's Weekend ...

The romantic comedy-drama is not dead; it's just being platformed.

I saw The Lunchbox, the first feature from director Ritesh Batra, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of last year. Starring Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur, it takes as its jumping-off point the dabbawalas of Mumbai, guys on ...

There's no one better to — as Stephen terms it — put the Y in YA than our youngest regular contributor, Code Switch's Kat Chow. So Kat sits in for our discussion this week of Divergent, which is not at all The Hunger Games, but ... sort of is. We ...

One of my old pals used to come walking into a room at the end of a long day, sigh, look around, and say, "Tell me two things good." They could be big things, small things, anything — he had to hear two things, and they had to be good ...