Linda Holmes

Several years ago, my best friend and I crafted a hypothetical movie in our heads, beginning from the advertising campaign. It featured Ashton Kutcher, shrugging extravagantly with his palms helplessly upturned. He was surrounded by, say, eight angry-looking actresses, some with their faces twisted as they yelled at him, some ...

It's not every week you get to hear me go full-on fan-crazy. (Okay, it's some weeks, but usually not about the people who are in the studio.) But this week, I am extra-excited because Stephen Thompson and I are joined for our pop-culture roundtable podcast by Gene Demby and Kat ...

"Mr. Lashes, 34 years old, is an agent for Internet cats."

That's a quote from The Wall Street Journal in an article about Ben Lashes, who recently landed a movie deal for Grumpy Cat, the online sensation rapidly becoming an industry. G-Cat has a book deal, ...

Here's a question: If you go to the movies and the scheduled showtime is, say, 7:30, when do you actually expect the movie to start? If you said 7:30, you go to very unusual screenings. If you said 7:45, you're closer to what many experience. If you said 7:50, you're ...

Tuesday night on The Voice, Adam Levine — who's the lead singer of Maroon 5 when he's not judging reality television — had two of the singers on his team eliminated. To understand this, just know that each of the four judge-coaches (Levine, Shakira, Usher and Blake Shelton) starts out ...

Broadcast TV has seen the writing on the walls at Food Network, Bravo and TLC: competitive food shows can build solid followings (Chopped, Top Chef) and so can shows about baking (Cake Boss, Cupcake Wars). Throw in a format popular in Britain called The Great British Bake-Off, and add the ...

There are times when the kindness of a gesture is undermined by its ostentatious nature — when the fancier your method of approaching another human being, the less it appears to be about them and the more it appears to be about you.

This is the risk inherent in any ...

As you know, we at Monkey See enjoy creepy wax figurines maybe more than anything in the world, and now, Wax George Clooney (whose adventures we have chronicled in the past) has been joined at a photo shoot in London by Wax Will Smith, as well as Wax ...

You may be familiar with the San Diego Comic-Con, a constantly expanding convention for fans that started as a niche event for comic-book nerds and is now a sprawling pop-culture event.

You may not be familiar with Comikaze. The brainchild of Regina Carpinelli, a fan who was unhappy with the ...

Last night brought the premiere of the new season of The Bachelorette, in which Desiree, who was rejected by Sean on the last season of The Bachelor, was presented with 25 men from whom to choose. The theory is that if television producers choose 25 guys for you to pick ...

I hate to break this to you, Men Of The Entire United States (Especially Actors), but The Atlantic has just run a lengthy piece pronouncing you un-charming.

At first, Benjamin Schwarz seems to mean "good conversationalist" when he says "charming." He says:

Women commonly complain about the ...

I admire Joseph Gordon-Levitt a lot, both because of his mix of performances in both big movies and little movies and because he made such a good transition from kid actor to adult actor with substantially less awkwardness than most.

Don Jon is his first feature, both as a writer ...

A new study from the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film has led to headlines claiming that women are missing from film criticism. "Female Movie Critics' Influence Shrinking, Says Study," reads the headline in the Chicago Tribune. "The age of the Internet has not ...

On this week's show, we take advantage of the new Star Trek movie to chat about — well, to chat about Star Trek, yes, but also more generally to cover the whole problem of coming in fresh to a franchise other people know well. We approach this particular film from ...

Dear Tiny Desk,

I don't know if you remember me, but I used to work maybe 20 feet from you. Before that, I worked about 10 feet from you, but people used to come stand behind me and breathe their miscellaneous lunch smells on my neck while you ...

1. Newton's Laws Of Motion

2. The Reluctance Of Brilliant Criminal Masterminds To Freely Confess

3. The Inability Of Two Things To Coexist In The Same Physical Space

4. The Integrity Of Vending Machines

5. Gravity

6. Gina Carano's Ability To Snap Most Of These People Like Twigs Pretty Quickly, ...

The biggest problem with pretending all of reality television is categorically odious is that it denies us the opportunity to identify and hold accountable what is actually odious. To those who insist that it's all gross — that no matter the documentary aspirations or good-natured competitiveness of plenty of unscripted ...

[Note: Before Midnight is an especially difficult movie to write about, simply because for some people, even what has become of Jesse and Celine since Before Sunset is information that they don't want. But it's impossible — absolutely impossible — to write about the movie without talking about where they ...

Consider what goes on in your brain when you, for instance, you watch an episode of Mad Men.

First, you have a reaction. "That's weird" is a reaction. So is "yuck." So is "wow." "This doesn't make sense" is a reaction, "that's a great dress" is a reaction, and "WHAT?" ...

To mark network upfronts week, we talk in this episode about the cancellation of shows, including the ones that came and went that we honestly can hardly remember as well as the ones — like ABC's delightful, hilarious Happy Endings — that break our hearts. We cover the ...