Entertainment

I don’t have statistics, but just from the disappearance of bowling alleys from the local landscape, most recently Santa Monica’s midcentury Pico Bowl, with its fine coffee shop, I’d guess that the sport is not the ubiquitous American pastime it once was. Still, many if not most of us will have gone bowling at least…

With the state of the nation worse on pretty much every metric, it’s good we can still gather round our screen of choice to watch film professionals win awards for a few hours on a March evening. This happened Sunday for the 98th time at the Academy Awards, sent via ABC, Hulu, Disney+ and other…

Sean Penn won the supporting actor Oscar on Sunday night for his performance as the ruthless, racist Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” However, Penn was not present for the ceremony, which became the subject of jokes from Kieran Culkin and Conan O’Brien. “We have a ‘no show’ from…

If April is the cruelest month, per T.S. Eliot, the Oscars surely must be the cruelest (and longest) season. Other awards shows push their way into the queue for moments of borrowed red carpet glory, but the Academy Awards are what the buildup is all about and the one people remember. Thankfully, the countdown can…

AUSTIN, Texas — “The Sun Never Sets” is filmmaker Joe Swanberg’s 10th indie to premiere at SXSW but his first to play the event since 2017. The astonishing pace with which he made his early work — loose, idiosyncratic stories that were progenitors of the emergent style known as mumblecore — has slowed significantly, but also given…

AUSTIN, Texas — One of the most anticipated events at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival wasn’t a movie at all, but a speaking appearance by director Steven Spielberg. The talk, a live taping of the podcast “The Big Picture” lead by co-host Sean Fennessey, covered many aspects of the Hollywood legend’s career, with a through…

It has been nearly three years since Hollywood writers went on a historic strike that lasted 148 days and ushered in an extraordinary period of labor unrest that virtually shut down the film and TV business. Now, writers are poised to commence another round of bargaining with the major studios on a new three-year film…

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, one of the top Democrats running for California governor, on Friday blasted USC and the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles for hosting a debate that he argues purposely excludes all candidates of color. Becerra said and the other candidates were excluded from the televised debate unfairly,…

In Naples, Italy, the past isn’t relegated to what’s behind us. In its crumbled, ancient majesty, the past is quite visible. And when it comes to the legacy of Mount Vesuvius — able to change the sky and move the earth — history encompasses all that’s above and plenty that’s subterranean, too. The notion of…

NEW YORK — What makes life worth living? For hard-core “Harry Potter” fans with money to burn, it might be getting Broadway tickets to interact fleetingly with Daniel Radcliffe in “Every Brilliant Thing,” an ingenious and touching solo performance piece written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe on the subject of suicide — or more precisely, on…