The film about Martin Luther King's marches for voting rights is being accused of alleged historical inaccuracies. Critic David Edelstein says that's "not entirely" fair, and it's still a great movie.
Ava DuVernay's new film dramatizes a turning point in civil rights history. She says she wanted to "elevate [Selma] from a page in your history book and really just get ... into your DNA."
The show, in its fourth season, was created by David Crane, who worked with LeBlanc on Friends. TV critic David Bianculli says its brand of satire is particularly timely and laugh-out-loud funny.
The New York Times' Ernesto Londono wrote editorials urging Obama to end the embargo. He tells of the changes he saw when he visited Cuba last month and how he sees the new relationship evolving.
Horace Tapscott led a big band in 1969, but his debut was for a quintet drawn from its ranks. Fresh Air jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a reissue of The Giant is Awakened.
In his new collection of short stories and a novella, Pelecanos explores crime, adoption and writing from an African-American point of view. He says he's "aware of the responsibility" to get it right.
Journalist Steven Brill's latest book critiques the Affordable Care Act, which he call "unsustainable." In the next few years, "something is going to snap," he says. "We cannot pay for this."
Leonard S. Bernstein — the writer, not the composer — once owned and managed a garment factory. In his first work of fiction the octogenarian crafts quaint parables about the comic futility of life.
Film critic David Edelstein says in 2014 none of the great material came from Hollywood studios. But, he says, it was a "wonderful year" for indie films. He names Boyhood as the best of the year.
TV critic David Bianculli says that he's encouraged by how far TV has come. He picks The Good Wife as the best show of 2014, having "the deepest roster of really strong regulars and guest stars."
The podcast is a reinvestigation of the 1999 murder of Maryland high school student Hae Min Lee. Her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed is serving a life sentence but has always maintained his innocence.
The biopic of landscape painter J. M. W. Turner depicts a man whose mind is barely engaged by anything other than his work. He's a mystery, and his art is magically indefinite — just like the movie.
Ahead of The Colbert Report's last episode, Fresh Air listens back to interviews with Colbert. "I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices," he said.
The co-founder of the Monty Python troupe admits he wasn't "naturally gifted" at physical comedy, and learned a lot by imitation. His new memoir, So, Anyway..., covers his boyhood and early career.
The 19th century painter wasn't always "very pleasant" and he was a "man of massive contradictions," Spall says. So Spall says he had to "dig deep" to play the title role in Mr. Turner.
This year, Fresh Air's book critic rejects the tyranny of the decimal system and picks 12 titles published in 2014 — all with characters, scenes and voices that linger long past the last page.
The film, based on Thomas Pynchon's novel, is set in 1970 in a beach town south of Los Angeles. With wonderful actors, it's like a gorgeous stoner art object: groovy, campy, dreamlike and funny.
