Entertainment

A month before our December awards vote, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. launches a group email thread for members to advocate for their favorite films and standout work. The idea is to help everyone close any gaps in our viewing as we plow through screeners and links in a hopeless attempt to see everything…

Hardcover fiction 1. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” 41 2. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $29) A woman upends her domestic life in this irreverent and tender novel. 33 3. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Grove Press: $20) During the 1985…

In January 1974, Jimmy Carter — then the governor of Georgia — hosted a post-concert reception for Bob Dylan at the Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta. Gregg Allman of the Allman Brothers Band was on the guest list, but he had been rehearsing in Macon an hour and a half away and arrived after midnight to…

Former Hollywood power couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were married for only two years. Then they spent four times as long undoing their union. The Oscar winners, who were together for about 12 years before Jolie filed for divorce in 2016, reached a written settlement agreement on Monday that finally ended one of the…

For Latin music, 2024 was yet another year of significant expansion — both on the commercial front, and in the stylistic detours and avant-garde tendencies favored by artists across the Americas. Música mexicana continued gaining new fans around the world, and the field of neo-reggaetón — and urbano music in general — realized that stepping…

A notorious kidnapper whose 2015 crimes — and the subsequent flawed police investigation — were turned into a Netflix documentary has been charged in two new cases committed years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area. Matthew Muller, 47, appeared in a Santa Clara County courtroom Monday to face charges in a pair of home…

A representative for Liam Payne was charged with manslaughter in connection with the One Direction veteran’s death in October, Argentine officials confirmed Monday. The National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor’s Office of Argentina announced in a Spanish-language statement that Judge Laura Graciela Bruniard on Friday prosecuted five people for alleged involvement in the pop singer’s death….

Charles Shyer, an Oscar-nominated writer, director and producer whose credits include “Father of the Bride,” “Private Benjamin” and other celebrated comedies, has died. After a brief illness, Shyer died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to the Hollywood Reporter. He was 83. “It’s with an indescribably heavy heart that we share the…

The legal drama surrounding “It Ends With Us” continued to mount over the weekend. On Dec. 20, Blake Lively filed a legal complaint against Justin Baldoni, her co-star and director on the film “It Ends With Us,” accusing him of sexual harassment on the set of the Netflix drama and waging a retaliatory smear campaign…

Any group that wants to recognize the work of the women behind two of the year’s best movies — the poignant poetry of Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” and the bruising body horror in Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” — is OK with me, even if that group is the Golden Globes, an organization…