Entertainment

Scott Baio practically grew up on television.

For many readers, the portal into Hilary Mantel’s work was “Wolf Hall” (2009), the first volume of an astonishing trilogy about 16th century fixer and enforcer Thomas Cromwell, who rose to power and then fell from grace in the court of King Henry VIII.

What’s new for home viewing on Video on Demand and Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

Spokane’s Robbie Berg is living a Beatles fan’s biggest dream.

I’ve written at length about the “games as a service” model before, wherein video games are continually updated with new content every few months. One of the longest-running examples would be World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game initially released in 2004 that continues to receive content updates to this day. Games like WoW and Eve Online pioneered the space with their subscription-based sales model.

The true-crime cottage industry that exploded in the years following "Serial," the podcast that became a cultural phenomenon in 2014, is inherently exploitative - even when the work in question has an ostensibly noble mission. In the case of "Serial," the mission was to find out whether an innocent man had been convicted of a murder he long maintained he did not commit. But even as the "This American Life" spinoff inspired fervent interest in Adnan Syed's 2000 conviction for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, it has also received criticism for what - and whom - it left out.

Remember back when alcoholism was a punchline?"The Good House" doesn't exactly hark back to the days of comic Foster Brooks, whose broadly slapstick "drunk" act was a comedy staple of the 1970s, but Sigourney Weaver's portrayal of a woman with a drinking problem in the film is for the most part too cute for comfort.

Writer/director Parker Finn’s feature debut “Smile” boasts the thinnest of premises based on a laundry list of horror movie trends and tropes, from the historical to the contemporary. Based on his 2020 short film “Laura Hasn’t Slept,” Finn inserts the latest hot topic in horror — trauma — into a story structured around a death curse chain, as seen in films like “The Ring,” “It Follows” and “She Dies Tomorrow.” All that’s needed to pass along the curse is a mere smile, but it’s the kind of chin-lowered, eyes-raised toothy grin that communicates something far more devious than friendly.

In an untitled, three-page short story, Ernest Hemingway casts F. Scott Fitzgerald as a scrappy boxer who leaves the ring battered and disfigured but ultimately victorious.

Before you throw out your old cathode-ray tube TV, you might consider the possibility that it’s worth something to the right person. A few weeks ago, I was thrift shopping with a friend when he pointed out an old 24-inch Samsung CRT in the corner with a prominent “FREE” sticker tacked on. I gave it a quick look and determined it was a quality set – a flatscreen manufactured in 2003 – hours of usage were presumably low, burn-in was unlikely, and equipped with plenty of ports for plugging in all sorts of old game consoles, DVD players and VCRs.

Written entirely in Salish, filmmaker Ryan Abrahamson’s latest work is an audio-video echo of the past. Loosely based on the legend of Devil’s Gap, the story came to Abrahamson like a poem.

Diego Luna always assumed his debut in the world of "Star Wars" was a one-and-done deal. That isn't the case with "Andor."

The advance hype for “Don’t Worry Darling” has been so incessant – from director Olivia Wilde’s location-turned-relationship with her leading man, Harry Styles, to a Kabuki-like feud with her lead actress, Florence Pugh, and something involving Chris Pine and Styles at the recent Venice Film Festival – that it’s easy to forget there’s an actual movie at the center of it all. A movie that’s not a disaster, but not particularly distinguished; a movie that, in the end, will wind up being as forgettable as its own bizarre publicity.

Lena Dunham’s warm, lively adaptation of Karen Cushman’s 1994 historical novel “Catherine Called Birdy,” opens with a needle drop that references another classic teen movie. Misty Miller’s cover of the '90s Supergrass tune “Alright” plays as a young Lady Catherine (called Birdy) (Bella Ramsey), finds herself in the midst of a mud fight during a raucous cottage raising in her medieval English village.

The British monarchy is one of the most impervious institutions of the modern world. Queen Elizabeth II, who ruled for 70 years before her death on Sept. 8, was at its enigmatic center.

Spokane Civic Theatre’s production of ‘The Wizard of Oz” opened Friday to an enthusiastic audience. It was community theater in all the best ways.

After gamers and critics alike showed a pretty understandable degree of exhaustion from overexposure to the Assassin’s Creed franchise – from 2009 to 2015, Ubisoft churned out at least one title every year – the publisher made the rational decision to slow things down a bit.