Bob Mondello
Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.
For more than three decades, Mondello has reviewed movies and covered the arts for NPR, seeing at least 300 films annually, then sharing critiques and commentaries about the most intriguing on NPR's award-winning newsmagazine All Things Considered. In 2005, he conceived and co-produced NPR's eight-part series "American Stages," exploring the history, reach, and accomplishments of the regional theater movement.
Mondello has also written about the arts for USA Today, The Washington Post, Preservation Magazine, and other publications, and has appeared as an arts commentator on commercial and public television stations. He spent 25 years reviewing live theater for Washington City Paper, DC's leading alternative weekly, and to this day, he remains enamored of the stage.
Before becoming a professional critic, Mondello learned the ins and outs of the film industry by heading the public relations department for a chain of movie theaters, and he reveled in film history as advertising director for an independent repertory theater.
Asked what NPR pieces he's proudest of, he points to an April Fool's prank in which he invented a remake of Citizen Kane, commentaries on silent films — a bit of a trick on radio — and cultural features he's produced from Argentina, where he and his husband have a second home.
An avid traveler, Mondello even spends his vacations watching movies and plays in other countries. "I see as many movies in a year," he says, "as most people see in a lifetime."
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Actor Sidney Poitier died this week at 94. Critic Bob Mondello examines the crucial decade that made Poitier a box office star and changed the face of Hollywood.
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Known as a maverick filmmaker, Peter Bogdanovich made movies that ran the gamut from the bleak, coming-of-age drama The Last Picture Show to zany comedies like What's Up Doc.
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The Iranian film A Hero is about a man who becomes a celebrity after doing a good deed. In filmmaker Asghar Farhadi's hands, what seems to be a black and white morality tale becomes more gray.
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In a year when many films didn't even open in theaters, there were still plenty worth talking about. NPR film critic Bob Mondello celebrates the best of 2021.
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Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar takes a long, colorful look at motherhood in his melodrama Parallel Mothers, starring Penélope Cruz.
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Denzel Washington takes on the title character in Joel Coen's Bard-based film, The Tragedy of Macbeth, with murder-minded Lady Macbeth played by Coen's wife, Frances McDormand.
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Marvel's latest superhero film, Spider-Man: No Way Home finds its hero battling foes he thought he'd already vanquished.
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Tony and Maria, Sharks and Jets — Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner take a fresh look at the musical theater classic West Side Story.
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Riz Ahmed has a pair of films opening this weekend — the sci-fi thriller Encounter in which he stars, and the documentary Flee, which he co-produced.
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Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, arguably the greatest artist in the American Musical Theater, has died. He was born March 22, 1930.
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Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, one of the most influential figures in the American musical theater, has died. He was 91.
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Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, stars in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, a warmly raucous look at an ambitious teen on the make in 1980s Los Angeles.