Arts Audio/Video - NPR

These days, the term for close, nonsexual friendships between straight men is "bromance." Critic Bob Mondello says the new comedy Humpday takes the idea about as far as it can go. (Recommended)

Sacha Baron Cohen dons hot pants and an Austrian-accented lisp for his new film, Bruno. Bob Mondello says that while the actor's appearance has changed, he's still pushing the same boundaries.

Viewers with no knowledge of the famed "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match in 1970s Zaire may have trouble following this story about a related three-day concert. But once the music starts, it won't matter much.

Chris Nahon's thriller promises a night of simple, nasty pleasures, but no such luck: Adapted from a far more involving and poetic anime from 2000, the film plays like a bottom-feeding genre pastiche.

Film buff Murray Horwitz kicks off our Summer Movie Festival with a rundown of our favorite movie villains, from Hannibal Lecter to the Joker, to Maleficent, "The Mistress of All Evil." Tell us who's your favorite villain, and what makes him or her so irresistible.

Google's operating system for computers will compete with Microsoft Windows. But Chrome OS, based on Google's Chrome Browser, will be free when it is introduced in 2010 on netbooks. That's because it's an open source project designed to get people onto the Web quickly.

Hombre Lobo is the first studio album in five years by the act known as Eels. Frontman Mark Oliver Everett — better known to his fans as "E" — turns in what he calls "12 songs of desire."

Thirty-nine years to the day after his first American Top 40 broadcast, radio host Casey Kasem signed off on his final broadcast and entered retirement. Kasem's countdowns aired across the U.S., peppered with his signature dedications and bits of music trivia.

An exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts is both an art history lesson and a celebration of the most sumptuous works of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin are the writers behind HBO's series Hung, about a hapless schoolteacher — with one substantial asset — who finds an unorthodox way to make ends meet.

For all the love pouring out for pop icon Michael Jackson, there are also those who feel conflicted about his legacy. Teresa Wiltz, a senior culture writer for The Root, says Jackson's artistry became eclipsed by his increasingly bizarre behavior.

Hundreds of thousands of mourners are expected to attend a public memorial for Michael Jackson in Los Angeles, and countless more around the world will watch the event on TV. But some fraction of the population wonders why the death of any celebrity warrants such attention.

It is perhaps stating the obvious to say that there is almost no money to be made in poetry. Some poets work as teachers, others in the corporate world. And even a Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. poet laureate needs a day job.

Thousands of Michael Jackson fans have descended on Los Angeles. A private funeral is expected to be held at Forest Lawn Cemetery, and a public memorial will be held at the Staples Center.

Friends, family, fans and luminaries remembered the King of Pop and performed his songs during Tuesday's star-studded memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The event is widely considered the largest celebrity memorial ever.

Huge crowds are expected for Michael Jackson's memorial service in Los Angeles Tuesday. When he died on June 25, Jackson left behind a tangled web of assets and a mountain of debt. The most valuable asset is considered Jackson's 50 percent share of Sony/ATV Music Publishing. It has the rights to more than 750,000 songs, including most of the Beatles catalog.

In the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London, there is a base, or plinth, for a statue that stands empty. Now, an artist is putting it to use for a project that involves 2,400 members of the general public each doing whatever they want atop the plinth for one hour.

Playwright Anna Deavere Smith has been hailed as the "most exciting individual in American theater". Smith talks about her extraordinary career and her latest project, a play about change in Washington, DC, called The Americans.

Errol Morris' Academy Award-Winning documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, offers fresh insight into the man many consider to be the architect of the Vietnam conflict.

Playing Shakespeare, a 1984 series in which actors dissect some of the Bard's most famous works, shows how crucial an understanding of Shakespeare's language and versification are to conveying the meaning — and power — of his scenes.

Remember that scene where Dorothy and Toto realize they're not in Kansas anymore? That same combined sensation of awe, homesickness and hallucination probably described the people in the crowd at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, as they stood before William Eggleston's color photography exhibit for the first time.

Food Inc., a documentary film about the modern agricultural industry, is a hit with big-city movie reviewers, small organic farmers and vegetarians. But ordinary farmers — the people who grow the lion's share of what America eats — have largely been left out of the mainstream media debate over the film.

It isn't easy to make money as an artist these days, but three crafty New Yorkers are managing to sell their work — and make a living — outside the traditional gallery system.

When it came out in 1961, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad perplexed and excited audiences with its surrealistic storytelling. John Powers has a review of the film's Criterion Collection re-release.

Since Michael Jackson died last week, his trading cards, old albums and autographs are selling for huge amounts of money. A letter Michael Jackson wrote to an unknown "Greg" sold for $20,000, and an album signed by all of the Jackson 5 sold for $27,000.

It's been a week since Michael Jackson's death at 50 stunned the world. But seven days after the King of Pop stepped off stage and left us behind, it's clear we just can't seem to get enough of him.

BookGlutton.com, a new interactive site, allows readers to chat while reading. Could this mark the beginning of a change in how we read books?

Pop icon Michael Jackson's will filed Wednesday in a Los Angeles court gave his estate to the Michael Jackson Family Trust. Who controls that trust is sure to be a huge legal battle. Stevenson Jacobs, a business writer for The Associated Press, offers his insight.

The powerful, sensitive character actor with the twice-broken nose had stirring roles on the big screen — notably A Streetcar Named Desire — and was a hit on TV in The Streets of San Francisco. He later served as a pitchman for American Express.

In the early 1970s, a documentary called An American Family followed the lives of Bill and Pat Loud and their five children. The filmmakers, Susan and Alan Raymond, talk about how the PBS series paved the way for what we now call reality TV.

This lush, good-looking crime flick doesn't really have a theme, and it never quite sparks to life. But it's got lots of incidental pleasures — Johnny Depp's spirited performance chief among them.

Sweet, silly and solid enough to entertain most anybody, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs insists that even carnivorous reptiles can learn a little something from the cooperative approach.

Zombies, long a horror-movie staple, are taking bigger bites out of pop culture, infecting books, banking, even our vocabulary. Beth Accomando surveys a genre trope that refuses to die.

Centered on a fatalistic portrait of a great American outlaw, Michael Mann's slick, authentic-looking drama is simultaneously an art film and a crime saga — one dazzling enough to keep the Dillinger legend alive for years.

In May, we marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's sonnets by asking NPR listeners and readers to write in with modern love poems or songs that they think will be remembered 400 years from now. Here are a few of those suggestions.

In 1989, Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing captured the racial tensions of urban America. Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice explores to what extent the film still portrays the racial divide 20 years after its debut.

Internet film producers Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have produced more than 200 videos that have been watched by millions of online viewers. They are part of a growing number of filmmakers who are finding ways to profit off of the Internet.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Patterson Hood's new album Murdering Oscar and Other Love Songs. It's Hood's second solo album featuring songs from the early 90's as well as some more recent ones, all of them have been freshly recorded over the past few years.

Pema Tseden is the first director in China ever to film movies entirely in the Tibetan language. His latest film, The Search, won the Grand Jury Prize at Shanghai's recent International Film Festival. He says Tibet has always been depicted by outsiders who pander to their own imagination.