Clockwise from left: The Social Reckoning, The Scout, Club Kid, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Possible Love and Wildwood. Columbia Pictures; Greenwich Entertainment; A24; Jaclyn Martinez/Amazon MGM Studios; Netflix; Laika hide caption
September 11, 2026 • A Social Network follow-up, the real-life origin story of the movie Rocky , and more movies our critics are looking forward to this fall.
Clockwise from left, East of Eden, Neagley, Brothers, A Different World, Slow Horses and Cupertino. Geoffrey Short/Netflix; Sabrina Lantos/Prime; Apple TV; Daniel Delgado Jr/Netflix; Apple TV; Elizabeth Fisher/CBS hide caption
September 10, 2026 • An East of Eden adaptation, a reboot of A Different World , Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson playing (possible) brothers ... Here's a sneak peek at what NPR critics will be watching in the next few months.
November 24, 2025 • Our annual reading guide returns with 380+ new titles handpicked by NPR staff and trusted critics. Find 13 years of recommendations all in one place — that's more than 4,000 great reads.
FILE - Jay-Z gestures from the sidelines prior to the NFL Super Bowl 59 football game, Feb. 9, 2025, in New Orleans. Frank Franklin II/AP hide caption
October 27, 2026 • The NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced Monday night that Jay-Z will be the featured performer for the halftime festivities on Feb. 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
October 26, 2026 • Elizabeth McCracken's connected short stories chronicle a family's encounters with their eldest son's girlfriend and eventual wife. This slim collection is so engaging, you may want to read it twice.
Tom Rhys Harries in Clayface . Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption
October 26, 2026 • Clayface brings R-rated body horror to this origin story of a Batman villain. The film stars Tom Rhys Harries as an actor whose dream life crumbles after an encounter with a mob boss leaves him disfigured. Desperate for a solution, he receives a revolutionary procedure involving nanotechnology powered by AI. What could go wrong? Director James Watkins goes hard on the horror elements, but is the DC Universe big enough to go beyond superhero fare, and take a walk on the creepy, crawly side?
Is private equity changing our food culture? Getty Images/Tetra/Winslow Productions/Photo Illustration by NPR hide caption
October 26, 2026 • Does private equity turn restaurants into zombified husks of their former selves?
October 25, 2026 • NPR's Ayesha Rascoe plays the puzzle along with Weekend Edition Puzzlemaster Will Shortz and WUOT listener Jordan Bogdan of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Horror writer Stephen Graham Jones invites readers to graft their own nightmares onto his monsters. Alina Art/Tor Publishing Group hide caption
October 25, 2026 • Horror writer Stephen Graham Jones says horror's current moment is powered by more than just fear.
October 25, 2026 • Every fall, snow geese migrating south stop in Vermont and cover the ground in a snowy white blanket. Now, a new picture book celebrates that real-life awe-inspiring event.
October 25, 2026 • The recent Meta settlement includes a clause banning "cosmetic procedure filters" for teens. But defining what constitutes an extreme makeover isn't easy.
St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, the seat of the Archdiocese of New York, holds mass on April 21, 2025, in New York. Yuki Iwamura/AP hide caption
October 24, 2026 • The 1,300 survivors of sexual abuse by clergy members and lay workers have all agreed to the settlement, according to an attorney for some of the plaintiffs.
A headshot of fashion designer Daniel Vosovic D. Vosovic/Daniel Vosovic hide caption
October 24, 2026 • This week, Wait Wait is live in Kalamazoo with host Peter Sagal, special guest Daniel Vosovic and panelists Rachel Coster, Peter Grosz and Shantira Jackson
A promo image for Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me featuring Peter Sagal, Daniel Vosovic, and Alzo Slade NPR and Daniel Vosovic/NPR and Daniel Vosovic hide caption
October 24, 2026 • This week, we’re live in Kalamazoo with fashion designer and Project Runway alum Daniel Vosovic. Plus, panelists Rachel Coster, Peter Grosz, and Shantira Jackson talk beautiful butts, suspicious robots, and well-preserved pumpkins.
Sul Kyung-gu as Ho-seok, left, Jeon Do-yeon as Mi-ok, Cho Yeo-jeong as Ye-ji, Zo In-sung as Sang-woo in Possible Love. The film will release in select theaters Friday, and begin streaming on Netflix on Nov. 6 Netflix hide caption
October 23, 2026 • Lee Chang-dong's novelistic drama tells the story of two very different couples who meet during the filming of a documentary.
Clayface, starring Tom Rhys Harries, is the first villain-centered, R-rated, body-horror movie. The results are ... mushy. Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption
October 23, 2026 • Like its protagonist, the film shoots out its goopy, mud-brown, protoplasmic feelers into the undiscovered territory of horror, but it does so too tentatively.
October 23, 2026 • Has Gen Z changed how we think about independents?
Olivia Colman in Wicker . Black Bear UK hide caption
October 23, 2026 • Wicker is somehow the coziest and horniest movie of the fall. Olivia Coleman and Alexander Skarsgård star as the unlikely couple: She’s a fisherwoman who commissions a husband literally made of wicker. The newly-kindled romance upends their small medieval town, where the men are the worst and the women are — surprise surprise — bored and unsatisfied with their own husbands.
Actor Tom Skerritt, pictured above in 2018, has died. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
October 22, 2026 • Skerritt was Captain Dallas in Alien , Viper in Top Gun , and a small town sheriff in the TV series Picket Fences .
"I was really struck by how much I look like myself," Betty Gilpin says of her role as a public defender on The Lowdown. "It was very emotional for me in a really exciting way." Kurt Iswarienko/FX hide caption
October 22, 2026 • "There's an understandable pull in my industry to make things ... super safe, super familiar," Gilpin says. She wants to go the other way. Gilpin currently stars in the noir drama The Lowdown.
In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves hosted a cocktail party at Duke Ellington's house for the surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance. Our critic says the footage, now featured in Once Upon a Time in Harlem, is "like watching a 50th college reunion set on Mt. Olympus." Journalist Gerri Major, above, was one of the guests in attendance. hide caption
October 22, 2026 • In '72, filmmaker William Greaves hosted a cocktail party for the surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance. Our critic says the footage is "like watching a 50th college reunion set on Mt. Olympus."
October 22, 2026 • London today is very different from the one Zadie Smith grew up in and the one she wrote about in her debut novel “White Teeth.” That is just one of the things Smith is grappling with 26 years after her best-selling book's debut. She talks to Rachel about the difficulty of revisiting the first few pages of "White Teeth," the wisdom only teenagers possess, and fighting despair with crème brûlée.
Karl Bushby, pictured here in Turkey in 2025, started his Goliath Expedition 28 years ago. Karl Bushby hide caption
October 22, 2026 • British Adventurer Karl Bushby left Chile with the goal of walking an unbroken path back to his childhood home in England. Now, 28 years later, his Goliath Expedition is coming to a close.
October 22, 2026 • Looksmaxxing, weight loss, and muscle building have fueled a massive craze for injectable peptides. Some natural and some synthetic. These injectables have unleashed a multi-billion-dollar gray-market industry online and a high-stakes frontier for the pharmaceutical industry. Today, we reach back to the quest to manufacture the first peptide-based medicine: Insulin.
