Author: JOCELYN NOVECK AP national writer

LOS ANGELES — In the hit movie “Wicked,” those famous magical shoes are silver. But if you want to see them in all their ruby-red glory from “The Wizard of Oz,” there’s no place like home — their current home, that is, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. There, Dorothy’s shoes, […]

NEW YORK — When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, “Bring Your Own Brigade,” at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge. “It was really hard,” the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. “I didn’t blame people for not wanting to […]

“The making of a good building,” observed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, “is a great moral performance.” Like many notable quotes about architecture, it speaks to grandeur, permanence, scale. One imagines Lázló Tóth, the visionary Hungarian architect who escaped the Holocaust and sailed to the United States to find his American Dream, would heartily agree. But […]

NEW YORK — Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney, who in a decades-long career has tackled many a thorny issue, wasn’t planning a film about Israel — until one day last year, when a stunning leak fell into his hands. The leak turned out to be more like a deluge. Suddenly, Gibney, through a source who contacted […]

The question sounds so basic and friendly. But it’s actually loaded, as many mothers can attest. “Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?” asks the younger, more put-together woman in the supermarket. “Must be so wonderful.” Wonderful, of course — and sometimes brain-numbing and soul-draining too, some exhausted fulltime […]

NEW YORK — I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little pygmy hippo, too! Forgive us the shameless attempt to link the fantasy hit “Wicked” to the delightful Moo Deng. But, hear us out — there’s something the two have in common as the year draws to a close. Escapism. Whether we found it on […]

It’s the ultimate celebrity redemption tour, two decades in the making. In the annals of pop culture, few characters have undergone an image makeover quite like the Wicked Witch of the West. Oh, she may have been vengeful and scary in “The Wizard of Oz.” But something changed — like, REALLY changed — on the […]

NEW YORK — There are few images more indelible in the history of American dance: Judith Jamison, regal and passionate in white leotard and long ruffled skirt, punching the air in “Cry” — Alvin Ailey’s piercing solo about Black womanhood. That searing 1971 piece made her an international star. But it was truly only the […]