Springtime on Broadway is usually racked with strategy, stress and speculation. New shows vie for every possible edge to capture the Tony Awards' brass ring of best musical, on the (often correct) assumption the award means industry prestige and a box-office bounce. To paraphrase a certain show,...
There was the guy who tweeted that he hoped she'd die in a fire, the one who sent her Facebook messages warning that she'd fail at her job and the online news commentator who quipped, "Never trust a writer with a head shot." "I did find that last one funny," said Katie Dippold, who has written...
Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner Inc.'s chairman and chief executive, collected a compensation package valued at $31.5 million in 2015, representing a 4% decline from the previous year. Bewkes, 63, received $2 million in salary, $7.9 million in stock options, stock options valued at $8 million and a $13.4-million...
It is one of the most unlikely images in existence. Two men of extreme power and influence, yet from completely different realms, one a politician and the other an entertainer. It is the kitschy incongruity of their appearance and body language, one stiff in a businessman's suit and the other relaxed...
Connor Everts, a Los Angeles-area artist and former longshoreman whose sociopolitical art was the subject of a 1960s obscenity trial, died Sunday at his Torrance home. He was 88. The cause was not disclosed. Everts completed his early work at night after working full days on the docks. His career...
Just months before President Obama told Congress to lift its 55-year embargo on Cuba in 2014, Bob Yari was on set in Havana, directing an action sequence of young revolutionaries attacking the presidential palace. In the midst of shooting the scene for his film "Papa: Hemingway in Cuba," which...
Want to clear your mind? Get a pickup truck, then spend a couple years driving across and around the continent — alone. That's the first lesson of the lovely retrospective of abstract paintings by Agnes Martin (1912-2004) newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show is divided...
As we enter the final two days of the TCM Classic Film Festival, our attention turns to tributes. Attention must be paid, as it were, and the lineup is an eclectic one with some potentially fascinating subjects taking the stage for extended conversations. "An Afternoon With Carl Reiner" is exactly...
Will Ferrell is skipping out on the Gipper. The 48-year-old actor was set to play the lead role in "Reagan," a satirical comedy about the former president, but on Friday a rep said he's no longer attached to the project. "The Reagan script is one of a number of scripts that had been submitted to...
Elisabeth Olson is leaving the swinging 1960s behind as she moves on from the world of "Mad Men" into the not-so-distant future where women are even more oppressed than they were at Sterling Cooper. Hulu announced Friday a straight-to-series order for an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian...
Early in the dramedy “Term Life,” Vince Vaughn’s character, Nick Barrow, explains that he has an odd job: “I plan heists.” Right from the jump, the film declares its allegiance to the universe of pulp paperbacks, B-movies, and trashy syndicated TV, where every hero is an antihero and every criminal...
People didn’t want to just see or hear Iggy Pop when he played the Greek Theatre on Thursday night. They wanted to touch him too — to put their hands on this proto-punk icon as though they could borrow some of the life force that continues to make him, at age 69, one of music’s most thrilling performers....
One way to think about the Radio Disney Music Awards over the last few years has been — wink, wink — as a small world. After all, the event, which began airing on the Disney Channel in 2013, has historically catered to a younger, more targeted audience than other music awards shows, such as the...
Kevin Hart was breathing hard. "I feel like I'm having a Hart attack!" he joked to a crowd of about 1,000 doing body weight exercises and running along with him at Grand Park, across from Los Angeles City Hall, this month. Most people know the pint-sized, fast-talking comedian as one of the funniest,...
The Punisher is getting his own series. Marvel and Netflix have announced that Jon Bernthal, who debuted as Frank Castle in Season 2 of "Daredevil," will reprise his role in "Marvel's The Punisher." The Punisher, of course, is the violent vigilante who is willing to employ whatever means necessary...
Actress Allison Janney who played Press Secretary C.J. Cregg on Aaron Sorkin's beloved White House drama "The West Wing" made her triumphant return to the White House briefing room Friday. Janney feinted at running the news conference in lieu of White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who, she...
When critics feel passionately about a movie, their writing sometimes seems elevated, as though the words come more easily and they're tapping into the pure critical center of their brain. Unfortunately for "Mother's Day," it may not have solicited the type of critical passion it was looking for. ...
Investigators are looking into whether Prince died from a drug overdose and whether a doctor was prescribing him drugs in the weeks before he was found dead at his home in suburban Minneapolis, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press on Thursday. The official said that among the things...
Just a week after the total pop music system meltdown of "Lemonade," Drake has rolled out a major album of his own. The rapper's new album, "Views" (a title truncated from its old, more Toronto-centric "Views From The 6"), was made available on iTunes and Apple Music on Thursday night. The record...
For the past quarter century, the garage rock label In the Red has served as a constant reminder of the infinite glory within a few guitar chords, a heavy beat and insane energy. This summer, the Los Angeles-based imprint will honor 25 years and thousands of three-chord wonders with a three-day...
Kesha isn’t exactly free, but if her newly released single “True Colors” is any indication, she’s liberated enough to begin reestablishing herself as a performer rather than the woman at the center of a courthouse drama. The embattled singer dropped the EDM ballad on iTunes late Thursday night,...
Michaela Pereira received a heartfelt send-off from CNN’s “New Day” program Friday before heading back to Los Angeles, where she’ll have a new program on HLN. Morning TV show transitions are rarely voluntary, but Pereira’s departure is a personal choice. A popular longtime anchor on KTLA in Los...
Ricky Gervais has written, directed and costarred in “Special Correspondents,” a movie for Netflix about a radio journalist (Eric Bana) and his engineer (Gervais) faking broadcasts from a war zone they have not actually traveled to. Based on the 2009 French comedy “Envoyés très spéciaux,” it's...
Being forced out of Walt Disney Co. two decades ago may have been the best thing to happen to Jeffrey Katzenberg. It didn't seem so at the time. But if that had never happened, he wouldn't have started DreamWorks Animation — or be in line for a nearly $400-million payoff he will get with its sale...
The rumor made its way from Hollywood to Comcast Corp. headquarters in Philadelphia: Jeffrey Katzenberg was about to take DreamWorks Animation private with the help of a Chinese investor. Hearing the news, Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts immediately called a top lieutenant, NBCUniversal Chief...
Is there any doubt that Francis Ford Coppola is the greatest American filmmaker of the 1970s? "The Godfather." "The Conversation." "The Godfather: Part II." "Apocalypse Now." Any two of those movies would put him in the running with Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, Martin...
Much of the pre-release chatter around "Mother's Day," the latest holiday-themed group therapy session from director Garry Marshall ("Valentine's Day," "New Year's Eve"), has focused on the subject of Julia Roberts' hair — specifically, the strawberry-blond Anna Wintour bob that her character wears...
Ads for the new film "Keanu," which combines kitten cuteness and gangster hardness, proclaim it as coming "from the visionary minds of Key and Peele." That would be Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, stars of Comedy Central's sketch television show "Key & Peele," which concluded its fifth and...
A psychological connection forms between two women around an unspoken secret in "L'Attesa (The Wait)," the feature debut of director Piero Messina. Jeanne (Lou de Laâge), on a trip to visit her estranged boyfriend, Giuseppe, at his home in Italy, unknowingly wanders into an oppressively stifling...
We expect our comedies to be hit-and-miss. They're different from action movies, which in recent years have become numbingly relentless — hit-and-never-miss, unless you're third thug from the left and swarthy, and your job is to shoot and then die. Now we have the strange case of "Keanu," starring...
Attempting to give enhanced meaning to "high concept," the British export "Dough," about a kosher bakery that sees a boost in business after a little cannabis is added to the batter, is a stickily genteel, cross-cultural comedy-drama that comes up blandly lacking on all counts. When Nat Dayan (Jonathan...
The biopic "Papa: Hemingway in Cuba" has some real bona fides behind it. With an autobiographical script written by journalist Denne Bart Petitclerc, the film depicts the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and a young Miami Herald reporter in the late 1950s, here named Ed Myers (Giovanni Ribisi)....
In the stately, stiff which-world-is-real drama "Pali Road," set in a Hawaii we know is actual and beautiful from director Jonathan Lim's many picturesque establishing shots, a woman suffers from consciousness problems tied to two men who love her. When young doctor Lily (Michelle Chen) and her...
Business news devotees may recall the Massachusetts-based supermarket chain Market Basket being hit by a devastating employee strike and customer boycott in 2014, after beloved CEO Arthur T. Demoulas was effectively fired by his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas. Tommy Reid's documentary "We the People:...
Even viewers who were transported by the considerable charm of 2006's "Paris, je t'aime" will be hard-pressed to show any love for the latest entry in the travelog/anthology. Despite its connotation of sun-drenched sensuality, "Rio, I Love You" is a dispiritingly dull affair, haphazardly joining...
A Broadway history lesson is being delivered these days at the Music Box Theatre, and never has anything this educational been so sensationally staged. All credit to Professor George C. Wolfe, holder of a PhD in theatrical pizazz, for adapting and directing this homage to "Shuffle Along," the 1921...
Emotional and effective, "Viva" is a torch song melodrama convincingly set in Havana even though it's written and directed by a pair of Irishmen. Nothing happens you won't see coming, but it's all so deftly done you're more than happy to wait for the inevitable to arrive. Shortlisted for the foreign...
Based on a popular PlayStation game, the sci-fi animated feature "Ratchet & Clank" seeks to capture the kid-friendly audience this weekend as well as the gamer crowd, which has a familiarity with the space-based game characters. The film is a basic hero story about Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor,...
The story of self-taught mathematical wizard Srinavasa Ramanujan — who in 1913 traveled from colonial India to the halls of Cambridge in Britain, shattering stereotypes with his theoretical ingenuity before dying tragically young at 32 — has already inspired a number of books, plays and films....
"Sworn Virgin," Laura Bispuri's subdued and intimate debut feature, follows a young woman who has availed herself of a centuries-old Balkan tradition to live as a man. You could say the movie arrives at a fortuitous moment, given that transgender stories and experiences have never been more culturally...
One of the earliest and grisliest scenes in "Tale of Tales," a fitfully entrancing English-language fantasy from the Italian writer-director Matteo Garrone, is what you might call an offal sight: A queen (played by a severe-looking Salma Hayek) sits in an all-white room, devouring the heart of...
Even decades after her death in 1975, political philosopher Hannah Arendt remains a figure of intense controversy, a situation the woman who said "there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous" would doubtless approve of. As revealed in "Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt,"...
In Hollywood's animation business, all eyes are now on one man: Chris Meledandri. Meledandri, 56, was already riding high as head of Illumination Entertainment, the main supplier of animated family movies such as "Minions" and "Despicable Me" to Universal Pictures. Now, with NBCUniversal buying...
Ready your sidearms, Academy Award-winning actress Alicia Vikander has been tapped to play Lara Croft in the upcoming "Tomb Raider" movie. This new "Tomb Raider," from MGM, Warner Bros. and GK Films, will tell the story of a young Croft setting off on her first adventure. Yep, folks, it's another...
Amy Schumer is putting her moneymaker where her mouth is. In the second episode of "Inside Amy Schumer's" fourth season, she's taking on gun control, a cause she adopted after two women were killed and nine others were wounded at a showing of her film "Trainwreck" last year in Louisiana. The gunman...