“No more love ballads,” Charlie Puth declares. “That was people nudging me in a direction that I didn’t want to go in.”

Q&A

Alfred Molina has been a jack-of-all-stages, creating memorable characters and tackling multiple genres on the big and small screens as well as in the theater.

“Saturday Night Live” cast member Kyle Mooney admits that the idea of standing at a mic and telling jokes about himself makes him uncomfortable.

The maestro Leonard Cohen used to describe his ballads as little things designed to help “get you through the dishes.” Rico Nasty, a 20-year-old rapper raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, approaches her craft with the same sense of utility.

Q&A

To the easily offended, Trey Parker has long been a kind of comedic super-villain. For decades, Parker and his longtime collaborator Matt Stone have been blowing up taboos left and right on their Comedy Central show “South Park,” in films like “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” and “Team America: World Police,” and in their Broadway smash “The Book of Mormon.”

Commentary

It certainly looked like a bomb. “Transformers: The Last Knight,” which cost Paramount Pictures over $350 million to make and market, earned a lame $69 million during its first five days in U.S. theaters in mid-June. Paramount executives could overlook that performance because in China, where the “Transformers” series has enjoyed a decade of wild popularity, the film earned over $123 million during the same period. But the time when Hollywood filmmakers could count on Chinese viewers to rescue them from disaster might be rapidly coming to an end.

It’s been a wild ride for director Jon Watts. Tasked with bringing everyone’s favorite web-slinger to the big screen in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Watts has entered the swirling $11.7 billion-grossing maelstrom of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

After puttering around the track for several years in teen vehicles like “The Fault in Our Stars” and the Divergent series, Ansel Elgort’s film career is about to jump into overdrive. As the wheelman in the car chase crime spectacular “Baby Driver,” he shows the winsome charm of old but reveals the unexpected ability to deal with high-speed crashes, rampant violence and wide-ranging genres of essential pop music.

In the short term, sure: It’s well and good for Universal and Illumination Entertainment that “Despicable Me 3” just won the weekend in North American theaters. Yet what the solid debut of the fourth film in the Minion universe really illuminates is the rare larger commercial milestone being hit here.

Sony Pictures Entertainment was running out of options for its most valuable film franchise, Spider-Man. After 15 years and five movies of web-slinging, the studio was struggling to give the character a much-needed reset.

Edgar Wright tells an audience that has shown up for an early screening of his latest film, “Baby Driver,” that he’s had the idea for the movie spinning around in his head for more than two decades. The spark of inspiration that has burned all these years came one day when a 21-year-old Wright was cruising around listening to “Bell Bottoms” by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Ross Golan has written hit songs for Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber and dozens of other stars. But his most important contribution to pop songwriting today might be a podcast.

Lifehouse will headline the festival on the North Carolina base and there will also be performances by Brett Young, Chord Overstreet, Muddy Magnolias, Temecula Road and DJ SpinDoc.

Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity’s amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature — to say nothing of our private insecurities —resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.

It’s not a good time for Jamie Foxx. It’s a GREAT time. A big reason the Oscar- and Grammy-winning performer is so happy is that he’s starring in “Baby Driver,” the latest feature film from director-writer Edgar Wright. His role in the car chase/romance/heist movie is as the psychotic Bats, a thief who is as violently crazy as he is deadly philosophical.

The trailer for CBS’s “Star Trek: Discovery,” the latest entry in the “Star Trek” universe, feature two women of color — Michelle Yeoh as the starship captain and Sonequa Martin-Green as her first officer — as they engage the Klingon people.

It’s official: Oscar-winning director Ron Howard is taking over the reins of Lucasfilm’s Han Solo “Star Wars” spinoff. Whether that’s a win for fans or the mark of a troubling turn to the dark side for the 40-year-old franchise remains to be seen.

Lizzo may be making some inroads into the mainstream, but she’s doing it by owning and often accentuating her differences. She’s that rare rapper-singer who can also lay down a flute solo. Her music blends everything from indie-rock to gospel, and accentuates her body-positive and feminist viewpoints with a sense of sassiness and sexiness that makes it not just empowering but fun.

Roxane Gay begins her new book — the hardest she’s ever had to write — by describing what it isn’t. “The story of my body is not a story of triumph,” Gay writes in the opening pages. “Mine is not a success story.”

The sun breaks across rooftops in the early days of a Brooklyn spring. The sidewalks are quiet, and Ethan Hawke is inside editing a movie about a shot-to-death singer most people have never heard of. The screen fills with a misfit’s raucous delight at banging on drums and mocking Richard Nixon. Hawke laughs. Then he leans forward, scratches his graying goatee and turns serious.

With her wide-ranging flair for serious drama, absurd comedy, nail-biting crime stories, legal thrillers and romantic roles of all categories, Rachel Weisz might be the most unclassifiable marquee actress in cinema today. She appears in more types of movies than is mathematically possible.

The new “Mummy” reboot is getting pilloried by critics — and that’s delightful news for one group of movie fans.

Music

Jade Jackson can recall every detail of the room in which she played her first gig — the size of the place, what it smelled like, the decor hanging on the walls. But of course she can: The venue, a cozy coffee shop in this tiny Central Coast city, sits just across the street from her parents’ restaurant, where the gifted young country-rock singer has waited tables since her family settled here the summer before she began seventh grade.

Marvel and Disney have created a sort of perpetual motion machine, churning out intellectually spare but critically and commercially successful films based on beloved properties. But DC has done them one better, creating a morally serious cinematic universe devoted to thinking about an interesting question: How would humanity react to the discovery that gods walk amongst us?

We’re not saying that Taylor Swift just released all her music on streaming services at midnight June 9 just because her nemesis, Katy Perry, dropped her new album at midnight June 9. However ... let’s take a look at this intriguing sequence of events.

Q&A

It’s all fun and games until they haul out the gas masks.

“The challenge I present myself with is to get out of my own way,” says Benjamin Montalbano, founder and frontman of Matthaus. “At the end of the day, that’s my MO and my reason for doing this project: to present songs that are digestible but also satisfy my own inner nerdiness.”

“A-leeeee-shaaaa!” The voice is unmistakable. It’s the same one that has announced the giveaway of dozens of free cars. The one that can make anyone - “John Tra-vol-tahhhh!” “Tom Cuh-ru-ooze!” “Celine Dee-onnnn!” - sound as if they’re about to enter the gladiator’s arena.

TV

Don’t keep up with the inner workings of Kevin James’ latest sitcom? It might be time to pay attention, because something odd just happened behind the scenes.

Q&A

Ubisoft announced May 26 that its upcoming video game, "Far Cry 5," will set the series in the United States for the first time. The story pits a player’s band of Heartland resistance fighters against a charismatic doomsday cult leader who kidnaps townspeople all while proclaiming a love of freedom, faith and firearms (not necessarily in that order).

Q&A

At his core, Jay Chandrasekhar, 49, is a storyteller. The actor/writer/director/comedian has been telling stories all his life — often raunchy, hilarious ones with his collaborators in Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe that formed at Colgate University in 1990 and went on to make the cult films “Super Troopers” and “Beerfest” in the 2000s.

On a recent spring evening, Tony Kanal and his bandmates prepared to take the stage at the Roxy in Los Angeles. It’d been 21 years since the Southern California-based bassist last performed at the famed Sunset Strip venue, and it was under decidedly different circumstances. At the time, Kanal’s band, No Doubt, was arguably one of the hottest live acts in the world, thanks in large part to the success of its multi-platinum breakout album, 1995’s “Tragic Kingdom.” This time, however, with a brand-new band, he and three other musicians were hoping for little more than a chance to prove their worth.

David Hasselhoff wasn’t actively stalking Zac Efron on the way to the beachside port-a-potty. But now that they were both there he figured, well, why not make the most of it?

Hollywood’s summer has flopped so far.

Hollywood just suffered its worst Memorial Day weekend in 18 years, an eye-popping omen for what’s shaping up to be a bleak summer box office.

Diana, princess of the Amazons, better known as Wonder Woman, has spent 75 years saving the world in DC comic books and TV shows, and has fought alongside Batman and Superman with her sword and Lasso of Truth. Still, her male counterparts have hogged the big-screen glory.

Movies

Hollywood loves a Cinderella story, and Stella Meghie has a real one. In 2009, Meghie quit her job as a publicist for fashion and beauty brands to go back to school and follow her dreams of being a writer-director. In 2011, she completed her screenwriting degree at London’s University of Westminster; the years that followed have been a film student’s dream.

Danny McBride has a special flair for playing obnoxious loudmouths — the kind of outwardly cocky yet inwardly tragic jerks that he’s brought indelibly to life in films like “The Foot Fist Way,” “Pineapple Express,” “This Is the End” and the HBO series “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals.”

There was a time when Hollywood executives were convinced that television would end the movie industry. They were certain no one would want to pay for entertainment when there was free TV to watch.

Stepping inside Disney’s latest theme park attraction, Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission BREAKOUT!, is like being thrust into one of blockbuster films’ pulsating, action-packed trailers.

Max Harwood and Danny Miller have been friends since they attended the same grade school in Washington, D.C. In high school, the two started a garage-rock/punk band.

Book review

Special to The Washington Post

Eddie Vedder stands alone now. Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell’s death May 17 left rock fans reflecting on the grunge era, and many came to a sorrowful realization: Vedder, the frontman of Pearl Jam, is one of the movement’s only icons who is still alive.

TV

Add another TV reboot to the long list of shows back from the dead: “Dynasty” will debut on the CW this fall.

Summer movie preview 2017

It's the summer of Chris Pratt. Again.

Warner Bros.' "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" failed to pull an Excalibur-like miracle to top "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," becoming the summer season's first big flop.

Zoe Saldana, who reprises her role as Gamora in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” says it’s great that there are more strong roles for women in film.

That day in the summer of 1967, Richard Goldstein walked into the New York Times offices in midtown Manhattan wearing a purple cape. He was 22, a hippie and a freelancer. And he was about to deliver a scathing review of the most important album of the year, perhaps the most important album in rock history.

Billy Joel wanted to be clear: He wasn’t starting a tour.

In “Voice From the Stone,” Emilia Clarke had a dream come true. The star of the HBO fantasy adventure series “Game of Thrones” had been excited about the project ever since she read the script.

If you’ve been to the movies recently, you might have glimpsed it — an unfamiliar name alongside the latest from Tom Hanks, Vin Diesel, Disney’s Belle and her Beast.

After three weeks of “Furious” box office results, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” from Walt Disney Co.’s Marvel Studios, took over this weekend.

A year and a half ago, Fionn Whitehead was an unknown aspiring actor working in a coffee shop in the Waterloo district of London. On his off hours, he’d go in for every audition he could, hoping to catch a break that would free him, he says, from “washing dishes and taking orders from angry businessmen.”

Hollywood, we have a problem. Somehow the summer blockbuster season has arrived without a 007 sequel, a Shrek threequel or a spinoff of the Hangover franchise. What's up?

When Michael McDonald was a teenager, he played as a member of one of the countless pick-up bands that famously backed the late Chuck Berry on the road.

In the appealing new Netflix comedy “Dear White People,” Justin Simien expands his 2014 movie about black life at a mostly white Ivy League college into a 10-part series. That this review is written by a white person would matter to some of the characters within the context of the series, but some of those characters would also wonder whether it should. It’s an issues-based Socratic comedy, of sorts, in which someone is nearly always bantering, debating or arguing; but it’s a romantic comedy as well, and a college comedy in a long tradition of them.

Epic reunion for a power duo

To say that Jude Law is director Guy Ritchie’s muse might be an overstatement, but the pair have worked together on three feature films (plus a Dior Homme ad campaign) in just the last eight years.

In the Martin Scorsese-produced shoot-’em-up “Free Fire,” South African actor Sharlto Copley plays Vern, a narcissistic gunrunner in a polyester suit who’s prone to a certain behavioral grandiloquence.

When Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published in 1985, no one knew from Hulu. The streaming service is now presenting the first three episodes of a 10-episode first season based on Atwood’s book. And so much of that sentence once would have seemed as outrageous as her dystopian story of a post-U.S. theocracy in which women have been stripped of their civil rights, with some sentenced to reproductive slavery.

Shonda Rhimes, the TV mastermind whose hits include “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal,” keeps a lid on plot twists. But she’s giving aspiring screenwriters a behind-the-scenes look at how to succeed in her craft.

More musicians are using new technology, including 360-degree cameras, virtual reality musical experiences and vertical videos, to reach the smartphone generation of music fans who are discovering new music on their phones and tablets.

Most actors who dine in Hollywood restaurants don’t talk to beret-clad strangers. And they’re especially not likely to be taking in disquisitions from one of those strangers on wine. Yet there is Charlie Hunnam — yes, gritty-as-dirt Jax from the FX biker series “Sons of Anarchy” — eagerly receiving wisdom from an older man in colorful headgear.

After weeks of feverish anticipation — and just days ahead of his headlining April 16 performance at the Coachella festival — Kendrick Lamar released his new album, “Damn,” on April 13.

Movies

“The Fate of the Furious,” the eighth installment in Universal’s “Fast & Furious” series, sped to more than $100 million domestically and $532.5 million internationally — notching the biggest global opening of all time — thanks to its muscular star power, fast cars, furious action and the kind of over-the-top spectacle usually reserved for summer blockbuster season.

Review

“Don’t be scared — I’ve done this before,” Lady Gaga told the massive crowd gathered April 15 for her Saturday night headlining set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. And, sure, this was hardly the Super Bowl halftime veteran’s first experience before a live audience numbering in the tens of thousands.

Oprah Winfrey says she lives without feeling rage, which is a nice way to go through your days but potentially limiting when you’re playing the pivotal character in a film about an emotionally scarred woman who is all but consumed by it.

Love, grief, loss and legacy are just a few of the reasons Mayte Garcia is stepping back into the purple light with a new memoir covering her 11 years with the late music icon Prince.

As I struggle for a diplomatic way to bring up that time when the internet was mean to her, Anne Hathaway graciously intervenes.

Octavia Spencer gets around. She co-starred in “Hidden Figures,” earning an Oscar nomination in the process. Last month she played God in the faith-based drama “The Shack,” then hosted “Saturday Night Live.” This fall she’ll star in Guillermo del Toro’s mysterious Cold War fantasy “The Weight of Water.” And soon afterward, she and John Hawkes will co-star as brother and sister in the dark, intense thriller “Small Town Crime,” which she produced, just as she starred in and produced Ryan Coogler’s must-see 2013 feature debut, “Fruitvale Station.” And that’s only 4 percent of her 120 acting credits in the past three decades.

The unquenchable thirst for chatter about President Donald Trump has changed the dynamics of a fierce daytime television competition much as it has in late-night TV.

Nacho Vigalondo grew up watching kaiju eiga — cheesy Asian monster movies. Now the 40-year-old Spanish filmmaker, whose work includes several shorts and low-budget horror and sci-fi films, has made a creature feature himself. His new movie, “Colossal,” represents a giant leap, elevating Vigalondo’s profile as a filmmaker and raising intriguing questions about human behavior, through the vehicle of genre cinema.

Over the weekend, country singer and former “American Idol” runner-up Lauren Alaina posted a Facebook Live video of herself, sobbing.

Richy Jackson was on a plane to L.A. from Houston when he got the big news. Well, the next big news. It was only March, and 2017 was already among the most demanding years of the visual director and choreographer’s career.

TV

Equipped with ergonomic chairs, fluorescent lights and dotted with Mac monitors, the room could pass for just about any modern-day, millennial-baiting workplace. It feels familiar, unremarkable even — that is, until the clouds of cartoon-y smoke start wafting past the windows.

The woman sitting next to the clock will lead you to the dark, scary place, the joyous epiphany. Her words are swift, her gaze fixed. A gleam, like a knife, waits in her smile. Elizabeth Mestnik has been teaching actors — strivers, posers and naturals — for decades. The unfortunate one standing beneath the globed-paper lights of her stage is about to get schooled.

Matthew Perry doesn’t bear much of a physical resemblance to Ted Kennedy, but at least he had nailed the late senator’s distinctive way of speaking. Or so he thought.

“You want some coffee?” Josh Tillman asked on a recent afternoon at his home in the Hollywood Hills. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and as soon as he got to work in the cramped, overheated kitchen, it was easy to see why.

Commentary

Most of the discussion before the release last weekend of Rupert Sanders’ live-action remake of “Ghost in the Shell” concerned the casting of Scarlett Johansson, who is white, to play Major, a character who was Japanese in the original manga and anime franchise. The optics of that decision fed into a long tradition of white actors playing Asian roles with results that range from cringe-worthy minstrelsy to performances that raise questions about why Hollywood apparently can’t bothered to avail itself of the Asian and Asian American actors already doing great work in the industry.

Women will walk up to Taylor Nolan in bars and not even introduce themselves before making their allegiances clear.

No Justice Leaguer has it as rough when it comes to solo movies as The Flash.

TV

“You want to take that phone call?” Rachel Ramras is midway through explaining how the idea for the new TV Land comedy “Nobodies” sprang out of a failed movie pitch to fellow Groundlings alums (and series executive producers) Melissa McCarthy and husband Ben Falcone when she catches cast mate and series co-creator Larry Dorf checking his phone.

The little kid stood right in front of the stage, his eyes fixed on Joe Mailander. The kid mirrored Mailander, one of the guys onstage in the Okee Dokee Brothers, down to the plaid shirt, pint-size fedora and toy guitar with steel strings and capo, no less. He mouthed every word that Mailander sang. Between songs, the kid tried to tune his guitar, just like Mailander did.

An album. A mixtape. An audiobook in which he annotates his old scripts from “Degrassi: The Next Generation.”

Movie review

The film “Life” is a test-tube baby, born from a blend of old-school monster-movie DNA and state-of-the-art digital effects. At times silly — yet surprisingly satisfying — this tale of sci-fi suspense and horror, set in the weightless environment of the International Space Station, gives Emmanuel Lubezki’s vertiginous “Gravity” cinematography a run for its money, with dizzyingly deft camera choreography and long, unbroken takes shot by Seamus McGarvey (“Nocturnal Animals,” “The Avengers”) that may remind viewers of his work on “Atonement.”

Movie review

The randy action-comedy “CHIPS” is pitched right to that 18-24 demographic, but that audience is probably wondering what this whole California Highway Patrol movie is about. Two words, teens: Erik Estrada. He was the ultimate late ’70s small-screen sex symbol and people were really into his hair — at least according to what we’ve been able to glean from the “CHiPS” detritus that always seems to be in the pop cultural ether.

Q&A

Even amid the chaotic melee on the Dolby Theatre stage during the infamous best-picture Oscar flub, Ryan Gosling was typically unflappable. While most reacted with shock and confusion, there was the “La La Land” star — cool and bemused — chuckling on the side of the stage.

Folks on Sesame Street have a way of making everyone feel accepted. That certainly goes for Julia, a Muppet youngster with blazing red hair, bright green eyes — and autism.

Audra McDonald has six Tony Awards and a voice that will make you believe in angels. That combination puts her in a place where she can be choosy when selecting her next job.

Jenny Lawson — the best-selling author of “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened” and “Furiously Happy” — has a new book, and it’s a coloring book, kind of.

While TV star Jussie Smollett was in the recording studio working on his own music apart from “Empire,” set for release later this year, he couldn’t help but write a song about what’s going in the world, from injustice to President Donald Trump.

One of the most cherished musical numbers in a Disney movie centers on a young woman ostracized from her community because she likes to read.

Movie review

Looked at logically, “T2 Trainspotting” should not work as well as it does. In fact, it shouldn’t work at all. But up there on the screen, where it matters, the dark magic remains intact and logic be damned.

Movie review

What would Howard Ashman have thought? We’ll never know. But as the credits rolled on “Beauty and the Beast,” Disney’s live-action update of its own 1991 animated masterwork, I found myself perusing the late, great lyricist’s words in search of a phrase that would do the experience justice.

During a recent phone conversation about his latest film, John Goodman wisecrackingly proved that even when the cameras aren’t rolling, he can put on one heck of a show.

For so long, March came in like a CGI lion and went out like an animated lamb. The month was often a safe space to open such kiddie fare as Fox/Blue Sky’s animal cartoons and handily win an audience.

Defending so-called “genre” fiction against the people who shallowly assume that it’s nothing but stories of ray guns printed on cheap paper stock is a long and noble argumentative tradition.

Music

Inside a trendy Fairfax District sneaker store in Los Angeles on a busy afternoon, Khalid is scanning the room looking for a pair that catches his eye.

Movie review

With seven full-on King Kong movies since his arrival on-screen in 1933 — not to mention countless media spinoffs — it’s reasonable to question his return in “Kong: Skull Island.” Why make another movie about the big ape? Turns out, there are excellent reasons. Lots and lots of them.

He’s a lover, not a fighter. The big ape called King Kong has been a chest-pounding pop culture icon for nearly 85 years. But for all of his destructive ways, the hairy heap of horror has a heart. More specifically, he has a thing for winsome blondes.

Rosamund Pike’s philosophy of acting is that it’s a process of observing what it means to be human. That way of thinking came in very handy as she tackled the feature film “A United Kingdom,” where she plays Ruth Williams in the true story of a marriage that almost brought down a kingdom.