By Bob Mehr In the spring of 1967, blues singer Taj Mahal was about to cut his first solo album for Columbia Records and needed to find a...

By Devika Girish This month’s picks include coming-of-age stories from India, Italy, Canada, Switzerland and Poland, in which children...

By Elisabeth Vincentelli ‘The Missing’ To communicate, Eric (Carlo Aquino) needs to write: texts on his phone or messages on a dry-erase...

By Manohla Dargis When Denzel Washington sweeps into “Gladiator II” — Ridley Scott’s epic about ancient Rome and men at war and sometimes...

By Genevieve Glatsky “A mamacita since she was 14,” the song says in Spanish, with a chorus that repeats: “And even though that little...

By Manohla Dargis With its flying monkeys and magical shoes, oh my, the story of the Wizard of Oz has been lodged in the popular...

By Alex Marshall and Julia Jacobs It was just more than three years ago that Alec Baldwin was practicing drawing a gun on the set of the...

By Brooks Barnes In their quest to find a host who will generate buzz but not blow up in their faces, Academy Awards organizers have...

By Sara Ruberg Two drummers for the Bee Gees — one during the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group’s early days of hitmaking ballads,...

By Jon Pareles The 25th annual Latin Grammy Awards, broadcast live on Univision from the Kaseya Center in Miami last Thursday night,...