PASADENA, Calif. -- Before actress Amy Aquino met her future husband, Drew McCoy, he was told she was one tough cookie. "She's great. But she's tough." That warning came from a mutual friend who suggested the set engineer might have a lot in common with Aquino.

The advice was right-on, admits Aquino, on a spring afternoon at a busy bookstore ...Read more

The Last Poets

"Understand What Black Is"

(Studio Rockers )

Many artists lay claim to being rap's first voices, but, from their searing, socio-political charged poetry to their dense, rhythmic flow, the Last Poets aren't just boasting. Touched by jazz, funk, and reggae through different periods of the band's 50-year career, Jalal Mansur ...Read more

"The Band's Visit" may have claimed 10 trophies at the Tony Awards last week, but it also scored a big win offstage as well: a bump in music streaming.

Since the June 10 ceremony, streaming of tracks from the original Broadway cast recording has soared, according to Nielsen Music, which analyzes consumption for the music industry. On the Friday...Read more

Dinosaurs: Keep them alive or kill them off? It's a question that haunts the human characters in between fireball-dodging cardio workouts in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom," the spectacularly ho-hum new entry in Hollywood's longest-running parable about the fatal idiocy of messing with Mother Nature. At this point in the game -- five films deep...Read more

Browse the Instagram feeds of any of the "Queer Eye" hosts and see their comments to each other, and it'll be hard not to question the depth of the friendships in your own life. The new Fab Five -- Bobby Berk (design), Karamo Brown (culture), Tan France (fashion), Antoni Porowski (food and wine) and Jonathan Van Ness (grooming) -- post such ...Read more

The scene captured in HBO's documentary film "It Will Be Chaos" is a familiar one: Parents seeking asylum are separated from their children at the border. They've fled starvation, persecution and bloodshed, then during their journey survived smugglers, bandits and other nefarious entities that prey on migrants, only to lose their children once ...Read more

If the news doesn't have you worried enough about the actual state of the world and the ethics of the people supposedly running it, here is another thriller about spies and spooks and the capitalists who ultimately control them to help keep you fretful.

"Deep State," which began Sunday on Epix, is the latest in what seems like an accelerating ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- Brie Larson roused the entertainment industry Wednesday when she used her platform at Women in Film's Crystal + Lucy Awards to drop sobering statistics from a recent USC study about the lack of diversity in film criticism. It's a field so disproportionately skewed that white men wrote 63.9 percent of reviews aggregated by Rotten ...Read more

You might think that having a documentary film made about your life was a good thing, that having awed folks calling you a cultural avatar and far-seeing visionary was worth a little trouble. You might think all that, but Vivienne Westwood does not.

The subject of "Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist" is introduced dressed in funereal black with an ...Read more

Writer-director Jim McKay has a way of making the everyday seem exceptional, of seeing the absorbing drama in what can sound like ordinary lives.

"En el Septimo Dia" (On the Seventh Day) is McKay's first theatrical film in more than a decade, and it is gratifying to have his particular sensibility back on the big screen.

It's not like McKay ...Read more

Happy birthday, Mr. President.

For his 72nd birthday on Thursday, social media star Chrissy Teigen and her husband John Legend spent a whole lot of cash on a gift Donald Trump won't like -- nor one that he can return.

The pithy model, who was famously blocked on Twitter by the president for constantly trolling him and his policies, marked the ...Read more

The Incredibles are back, and all is right with the world.

Well, maybe not all. Superheros are still illegal, just as they've been for a decade and a half, and evildoers like the Underminer ("I am always beneath you but nothing is beneath me!") are still eager to empty the bank vaults of Municiberg and manufacture havoc wherever they go.

But ...Read more