Film

The "Barbie" movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, is a big topic of conversation this summer. But to a special subset of audience members, girls who played with Barbies, the movie can evoke a lot of pink-tinged feelings. Here's one of those girls, our book critic Maureen Corrigan.

Justin Chang says that whether you watch them back to back or on different days, both Barbie and Oppenheimer are well worth a theater-going experience.

Tom Cruise returns as secret agent Ethan Hunt in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1," the seventh movie in the long-running spy series and the first half of a two-parter that will conclude next year. In the movie, which Cruise also produced, Hunt and his fellow agents battle a mysterious new global threat. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

The new film "Joy Ride" is an R-rated road trip comedy about four Asian Americans traveling together in China. It's the first movie directed by Adele Lim, a co-writer on "Crazy Rich Asians," and the ensemble cast includes Stephanie Hsu, a recent supporting actress Oscar nominee for "Everything Everywhere All at Once."

Justin Chang reviewed the new film "Past Lives."

Beginning today, PBS presents a new "American Masters" documentary about singer, musician and composer Richard Penniman, famously known as Little Richard. The program focuses on both his impact on popular music as he went in and out of rock 'n' roll and on his complicated, sexually shifting private life. It's called "Little Richard: King And Queen Of Rock 'n' Roll." Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.

As controversy swirls around the benefits Thomas and his wife Ginni received from a conservative billionaire, filmmaker Michael Kirk examines the couple's path to power in a new PBS documentary.

New York Times media reporter John Koblin discusses the Hollywood writers' strike — and how streaming has upended every element of TV and film production, leading to deteriorating working conditions.

The new movie "BlackBerry" recounts the dramatic rise and fall of the Canadian tech company that led the smartphone revolution in the late '90s and early 2000s before the iPhone came along. It was directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, who plays one of the company's three co-heads, along with Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton.

The former SNL cast member stars as a somewhat autobiographical, sometimes exaggerated version of himself in this entertaining new series, co-starring Edie Falco and Joe Pesci.