Linda Holmes

Meet Tony Stark at the opening of Iron Man 3: insanely wealthy, possessed of every toy, and traumatized by an attack on New York that has left him restless, anxious, belligerent, and given to both hunker-down security measures and fate-tempting swagger. He declares his total lack of fear, then builds ...

Happy Friday, PCHH-ers. This weekend brings us all Free Comic Book Day, and we take that opportunity in this episode to talk about how changes in brick-and-mortar retail are affecting pop culture. Do you need a bookstore guy to tell you what to buy? Do you need a ...

One more quick item for this morning.

Filmmaker/designer/animator Adam Patch has posted this video to Vimeo, in which his wife, while somewhat drunk, tells him a joke about two corn chips. He created the animation to go with it.

I cannot begin to tell you why this is ...

It's Friday, and that means it's time for a photo of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler clowning around with a guy dressed up like a monster wearing essentially the same shiny housecoat as Steven Tyler.

It's a new tradition, but I'm hoping it will catch on.

In this case, Tyler is ...

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Discovery's nifty new science series The Big Brain Theory, hosted by Kal Penn, is how ordinary it is.

Right from the title, Big Brain plays into the same fascination with nerd culture that fuels The Big Bang Theory, and that fueled other reality shows ...

In the early days of New Girl, Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel) was a toddler-sized tutu made flesh: cute, affected, hard to actually dislike, but earning grins largely by doggedly evoking childhood's clumsy and doomed attempts at grace. Building a comedy around her resulted in a one-note dynamic in which her ...

If this guy actually lost his life savings playing "Tubs Of Fun," that's sad. And if the game was rigged, that's fraud! Also, I think that banana is offensive.

But I find it almost entirely impossible to believe this is actually a dude who carries this item around with him ...

In the world of television, there's nothing quite like a soap habit. People watch characters evolve not over the 10 or 15 seasons that might mark a long run in prime time, but over 30 or 40 years, until they have kids and grandkids — sometimes played by the same ...

Iron Man 3 doesn't open in North America until this Friday (May 3), but this weekend, it's already up and whomping The Avengers at the international box office. The new adventures of Tony Stark, directed and co-written by Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black, brought in $195.3 million. That beat a ...

This is the time of year when we take a deep breath and a look ahead to the long summer movie season. And this year, as Stephen is quick to point out, things look pretty dire. There's a lot of apocalyptic stuff going on, and zombies, and vampires, and even ...

This has been a difficult year for The Office. There are only three episodes left after "Paper Airplanes," which aired Thursday night, and where 30 Rock rallied as it headed to the finish, The Office has seemed lost, particularly by devoting substantial time to world-building Dwight's beet farm, a remnant ...

Is there any reason to be a professional public hero anymore when you can be a professional public dummy?

Let's back up. Specifically, let's back up to the summer of 2012, when swimmer Ryan Lochte won five Olympic medals to bring his lifetime total to 11. Prior to that time, ...

Jimmy Kimmel Live ran this rather remarkable segment in which, as the show explained it, people walking into Coachella were asked about bands that do not, in fact, exist. Nevertheless, these particular folks had strong opinions about the great "energy" of The Chelsea Clintons, and the album DJ Cornmeal, which ...

This is a photocall for Smurfs 2. So you really can't blame any of these people who don't have felt heads for looking with their human heads like they're not having a great time.

Katy Perry and Neil Patrick Harris will both return for the sequel, scheduled for U.S. release ...

Saturday night at Town Hall in New York, the Nor'easters of Northeastern University in Boston were crowned national champions at the International Competition of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), the entirely real battle dramatized in last summer's surprise hit Pitch Perfect.

On the same night, the organizers announced from the stage ...

So let's speak candidly for a moment.

This is not an ordinary day. It has not been an ordinary week. We taped this week's podcast on Monday at 6:00 p.m., in the first hours of coverage of the bombings in Boston. We are posting it on Friday, in the first ...

I can't really explain why I think wax museum pictures are so funny, but clearly, I do. And I do again.

And now, it's the members of One Direction, immortalized (sort of) at Madame Tussauds, where, at an official photocall, some girls obligingly posed with these ...

Beware, Midwesterners: reality television is coming for you.

The last couple of seasons have brought an outpouring of what is ungenerously referred to as "redneck television" — shows that highlight the American South, sometimes affectionately and sometimes in a spirit of distilled mockery. While many of these shows have ...

UPDATE, 4:08 p.m.: In addition to the institutions mentioned below, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has announced that admission will be free on Wednesday, April 17.

At least two art museums in Boston, the Museum Of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art, have announced that ...

Oh Sit! (The CW, 8:00 p.m.): When the CW first announced that it was going to have a show called Oh Sit!, which would basically be a game of musical chairs with a punny scatological name, it seemed like it would be exciting in its sheer stupidity. But as it ...