The Brooklyn-based comedian Eugene Mirman is the stand-up king of hipsterville. He was a regular on the HBO series Flight of the Concords and now features on Adult Swim’s Delocated. But don’t cross this guy: when Mirman got fed up with his cable company, he...

Video: Eugene Mirman vs. Time Warner Cable

Last month, Chinese President Hu Jintao announced that his government was investing heavily in homegrown, exportable cultural programming. And yet, just days later, the government shut down two-thirds of its domestic satellite television shows for undermining Chinese values. ...

Video: Hunan Satellite TV’s Spring Festival Gala

A new film called Miss Bala is an artful, riveting depiction of Mexico's drug war, and it isn’t the good guys-bad guys shoot-em-up you might expect. Instead, the story is told through the eyes of an innocent bystander: a beauty pageant contestant who finds herself in the wrong place at the ...

Video: A scene from Miss Bala

The Scene: San Antonio
From Texas Public Radio's The Source, a weekly program on the arts, environment, politics, and education in San Antonio, hosted by Eileen Pace.

Last week, a silent film was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar for the first time in 85 years.  The last time that happened was at the first Academy Awards ceremony, and the picture that won was Wings (1927), shot in San Antonio. Wings is the story of two young men who enlist ...

Samantha Hunt describes the turning point in Tesla’s life when he began acting like a mad scientist we recognize from movies, and Biologist Vincent Pieribone traces how scientists have been portrayed on screen — from Dr. Strangelove to Independence Day. He remembers watching ...

The new DVD Talking Heads: Chronology contains film and video of Talking Heads in performance going all the way back to 1975 — before the advent of camcorders, and two years before the release of the band’s first LP. Kurt Andersen talks with David Byrne, the band’s ...

Video: Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer" Live at CBGB, 1975

Despite success abroad, the Iranian film industry is in serious trouble with the government. Prominent directors have been jailed, and last week the government shut down the House of Cinema, Iran's largest independent film institute. Filmmaker Rafi Pitts believes the industry "has been pushed ...

As Mitt Romney wraps up his audition to be the Republican nominee, he looks increasingly in control of everything but his image. The problem, according to New York film critic David Edelstein, is that Romney fits the role of President too well. “If you were a casting director and you ...

Kurt Andersen notes that we're in an age of flux and paralysis at the same time. In entertainment, we yearn for authenticity — but ten million of us watch the Kardashians every week. Where do we go from here? Playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick and Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams help ...

You don't get much more famous than Angelina Jolie. The acting roles that made her famous (the troubled teen in Girl Interrupted, the ass-kicking archeologist in Tomb Raider) have long been overshadowed by her personal life – the endless stream of chatter about her six children with Brad ...

Angelina Jolie may be the most tattooed actress in Hollywood. She has the coordinates of her children’s birthplaces on her arm, a Buddhist Pali incantation on her shoulder blade, a cross on her hip, a rune on her wrist, a tiger on her lower back ... Jolie recently ...

Robert Downey Jr., who stars in the new movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, is the latest actor to take on this iconic role. Guy Ritchie, the film's director, says Holmes' persona is an even divide between enigma and accessibility. WNYC's Sarah Montague traces ...

For eight seasons, House, M.D. has been diagnosing patients with the same reason, deduction, and flair that Holmes relied upon to solve crimes. And that's no accident: the show's creator, David Shore, tells Kurt that his series was originally conceived as a police ...

A new film premiered this year that is truly one of a kind. whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was made by Eve Sussman and her collaborators, known as the Rufus Corporation.  They shot most of the footage in Kazakhstan, improvising the script and taking advantage of the Soviet Union’s ...

Video: watch the trailer

Kate Winslet was just 21 when she starred in the mega-blockbuster Titanic (1997). In high demand ever since, Winslet brings depth to her roles, from a former Nazi prison guard (The Reader, 2008) to a bored but complicated housewife (Little Children, 2006). The strains of marriage and ...

This year saw a record number of sequels, reboots, and spin-offs: of the ten highest grossing movies, only one, Bridesmaids, was entirely original. Kurt Andersen talks with Sharon Waxman, editor of Hollywood business site The Wrap, about why 2011 ended up being a mediocre year for films ...

Hollywood likes to cast model-type stars as high-level as high level scientists (remember Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in a James Bond movie?). In this case, it’s true. Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood ...

For as long as there's been a World Wide Web, there's been a giant unresolved issue with what’s on it: those millions of songs, videos, TV and movie clips we enjoy for free — somebody owns each one. Now Congress is trying to tame the internet's wild west. This week the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on ...

David Cronenberg is best known for films like The Fly, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers and A History of Violence. They can be shocking, violent, and gory — but they’re also unmistakably personal films that make you think while you’re squirming in your seat. Cronenberg’s new film is a straightforward historical drama. ...

Bonus Track: Cronenberg's horror debut

Inní by Sigur Rós is both a trippy documentation of the band's 2008 tour and the band's first-ever live album.  The DVD/CD set is out today and the New York Times calls it a concert film that "leaves most of its genre in ...