Radio Programs

Eight years ago, the British comedian Joe Cornish wrote and directed Attack the Block, a sci-fi horror-comedy about a bunch of rowdy South London teenagers warding off aliens from outer space. It was funny, scary and also touchingly sincere in its belief that children are the future, that the fate of the world really does rest on our young people's shoulders.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The film "The Last Black Man In San Francisco" won two prizes at this year's Sundance Film Festival, including one for its first-time feature director Joe Talbot.

Leaving Neverland,by documentary filmmaker Dan Reed, is a tough show to watch — but it should be seen. Its central question is whether Michael Jackson used his fame and money to seduce young boys and their families into enabling a hidden pattern of serial pedophilia.

As a third-generation Jehovah's Witness, Amber Scorah believed she had the answer to life's biggest questions. The answer was Armageddon, and it predetermined everything.

"If the world is ending, why would you go to college?" Scorah says in an interview.

Legionand Jessica Jonescome from the more recent generations of Marvel comics, featuring relatively obscure characters. Neither show's protagonist is a superhero in the conventional sense of wearing a costume or having a secret identity, and both are battling inner demons as well as powerful adversaries.

"Let the people see what they did to my boy." Those were the words spoken by Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, after viewing the brutalized body of her son.

During his night of torture near the Delta town of Money, Miss.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Actor Rip Torn, who had a long career in film, television and theater, died Tuesday at his home in Connecticut. He was 88. He earned critical acclaim and one Tony nomination for his performances on Broadway, often in Tennessee Williams plays.

Climate change is often thought of as a partisan issue in the United States, but New York Timesjournalist Nathaniel Rich says that wasn't always the case.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The heroine of Nell Freudenberger's new novel "Lost And Wanted" is a physicist who finds her rational understanding of the universe challenged by the death of a friend.

It has become the nature of television to ramp up everything, even things that don't need it — like murder. We've grown so accustomed to seeing hot-button crimes and high-powered cops that it feels almost radical when a crime show goes in the other direction and plays it straight.

In the viscerally unnerving films of Ari Aster, there's nothing more horrific than the reality of human grief. His haunted-house thriller, Hereditary, followed a family rocked by traumas so devastating that the eventual scenes of devil-worshipping naked boogeymen almost came as a relief.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The search for a biological understanding of mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and panic disorder, is the subject of the new book, "Mind Fixers," by my guest, Anne Harrington.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. In 1962, Ray Charles released two albums that became surprise hits - "Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music," Volumes 1 and 2.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The Mueller investigation gave us insights into how Paul Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates, hid their ill-gotten money with the help of shell companies and real estate, protecting it from the reach of the law, until the investigation.

It's a commonplace that we never really know other people, not even those we love. This idea gets pushed to the limit in Mrs. Wilson, a new three-part drama from PBS' Masterpiece starring the electric English actress Ruth Wilson, whom you may know from Luther and The Affair.

In the classic 1940 novel Native Son, 20-year-old Bigger Thomas dreams of a life beyond his impoverished Chicago neighborhood.

As in the book, the new Native Son movie begins with Bigger killing a huge rat in his house, where he lives with his siblings and their single mother.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck discusses his new film about an artist who grows up in Nazi Germany, comes of age in East Germany and travels to the West to find freedom for himself and his art.

Venezuelans have been suffering one calamity after the next, but in recent weeks, much of Venezuela has had to go long stretches without electricity.

New York Times journalist Nicholas Casey was in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in March when the country was hit by a six-day blackout, considered at the time the worst in Venezuela's history.

Jia Tolentino's strict Christian upbringing backfired.

"I am sure that you don't send your kid to Christian school for 12 years and hope that they'll do what I did: Which is have the New Yorkerpublish 7,000 words about how the church led me to love doing MDMA and love rap music," she says.

Lee, one of the premier singers of new jazz, mixes it up with pianist Blake on a newly reissued two-CD set featuring standards and straight-up jazz tunes the two recorded in Belgium in 1966 and '67.

Many women have a hard time admitting — even to themselves — that they're being abused by their husband or partner. Suzanne Dubus' first husband hit her, but still, she didn't initially identify herself as a victim of abuse.

New York Timesreporter Michael Schmidt doesn't have a badge or a gun or the ability to compel people to talk to him. Nevertheless, he has found sources to help him break major stories concerning special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into connections between President Trump, his associates and Russia.

Set in Hollywood in 1969, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt star as a TV actor and his stunt double. The movie's low-key hangout vibes may test your patience, but every moment pulses with feeling.

In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced a goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth" before the end of the decade, the mission seemed all but impossible.

Laila Lalami's new novel is called The Other Americansand it's likely to jump start some timely book group discussions about the American experiment; specifically, about how different types of people feel less visible in this country because of their ethnicity, class, race or citizenship status.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Over the past 40 years, Sir David Attenborough has become internationally known and respected for his groundbreaking documentary shows about the natural world. His new eight-part series "Our Planet" is currently streaming on Netflix.

Melissa McCarthy is not interested in playing pleasant characters — flawless women with perfect clothes and relationships. "Who wants to watch that?" she asks. "There's nothing to sink your teeth into. .

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're going to talk about a part of the criminal justice system that my guest describes as trapping the innocent and making America more unequal - the massive misdemeanor system.

Berman was 60 when she moved to New York with just one suitcase to start a new life. Berman's daughter, Maira Kalman, and grandson, Alex Kalman, tell her story in a new book and museum show.

It was a cold December night in 1972 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A 38-year old widowed mother of 10 named Jean McConville was with her children in their apartment in the Divis Flats, a labyrinthine public housing project that one critic described a "slum in the sky.

Last year ran me ragged. Every comedian feels bad, all the time. That's why we do comedy. But this felt different. Nothing could get me out of bed. It was two months before a shooting at two mosques in New Zealand that would claim the lives of 51 people, and there I was, checking boxes about my thyroid in a surgeon's waiting room:

"Do you sometimes acutely believe that people hate you?" Yes.

Billionaire filmmaker Howard Hughes has long been regarded as one of Hollywood's most eccentric and prolific playboys. A few years back, writer and film critic Karina Longworth stumbled onto an online message board, listing women Hughes had had sexual relationships with – just a list of names, no other information.

Time was when the word "socialism" had a firm footing in the American political lexicon, with as many meanings as it has collected in all the other nations where it has taken root — as mixed or pure, as planned or market, as democratic or authoritarian, as a dogma or simply an aspiration — "the name of our desire," as the critic Irving Howe (and Lewis Coser) famously defined it.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Breakthroughs in heart medicine, including surgical procedures, devices and medications, have changed how various forms of heart disease are treated and enabled many people to live longer lives.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The Emmy-nominated series "Succession" tells the story of a family whose members struggle for control of the media empire founded by its patriarch.

After 12 seasons on Law & Order: SVU, Christopher Meloni plays a disgraced policeman-turned-hit man (who collaborates with an imaginary unicorn) in the second season of the Syfi Channel series Happy!.