Arts & Life

The list of accolades is long for Rita Moreno. The 86-year-old is the only Latina — and one of just 12 artists overall — to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony for her work. This weekend, she received a different kind of award — for her advocacy. The Ellis Island Honors Society is giving her a medal of honor for her work with immigrant communities.

Spring is in the air and love is all around, as these three delightful romance novels show. Whether in a New Jersey high school, a Scottish palace or Victorian England, these stories show happy-ever-after is always within reach.

My So-Called Bollywood Life by Nisha Sharma is a bright, sassy, and totally charming young adult love story, starring Winnie Mehta, who sees everything in her life through the lens of her beloved Bollywood films. So naturally, there's a love triangle, a prophecy, and a big song and dance number — all set in a New Jersey high school.

When Trenton Doyle Hancock was 10 years old, he made up a superhero: Torpedo Boy. The character has become the center of a complicated cosmos Hancock has developed obsessively for more than 30 years. There are drawings, paintings, sculptures — and now, a plush stuffed doll.

"Well, he looks like me," Hancock says. "He's a black guy. His face is basically my face."

Shakespeare wrote great tyrants. Macbeth, the Scot who plots a bloody route to the throne; Richard III, the brother of a king, and "rudely stamped," in Shakespeare's phrase, who murders his way into power and madness; Coriolanus, the Roman ruler who believes power in the hands of citizens is like permitting "crows to peck the eagles," and betrays his city; King Lear, Lady Macbeth, Henry VI, Julius Caesar — one of Shakespeare's themes is how men and women may lust for power, then use it in the worst way.

There are two kinds of extremely smart books: The ones that make you feel small and stupid, as if the author is telling you how far above you their intelligence lies, and the ones that makes you feel smart reading them, that demonstrate the author's respect for her reader. Rubik, the debut novel by Australian writer Elizabeth Tan, is the best example of the second kind.

Canadian-born psychologist Jay Van Bavel likes Canadian beer.

"I can't say what it is," he says, laughing, "I just love the taste."

When Van Bavel sips a beer from his hometown, there is a feedback between his taste buds and his brain. He's reminded of his Canadian-ness, he feels more Canadian, and Canadian beer tastes better to him than other beers.

Nostalgia is a paralytic toxin.

It's killing us slowly, steadily: Every time an old, smarmy sitcom, or a pallid network drama, or a toy ad that masqueraded as a cringeworthy children's cartoon gets dredged from the feculent muck of history's lake bed and rebooted for a contemporary audience, our cultural blood pressure incrementally drops, our collective pulse grows that much threadier, our soft tissues go just a scosh more necrotic. That's because these properties exude nostalgia's deadly poison — they're sticky with it — and there is no antidote.

One of the first shots in the new documentary called, simply enough, Mountain, is of a solo climber hanging from a the face of a cliff, hundreds of feet up ... untethered.

Melissa McCarthy's capacity for sweetness has come full circle.

Her first big role was on Gilmore Girls, where she played the gentle, funny, burbling Sookie St. James. Sookie's dimples, her delightful chirp, and her unrelenting sunniness could have sunk the character as a little bit of a sap, but McCarthy carried it off, using about 10 percent of what she turned out to be capable of.

Leon Vitali was a young and talented British actor on the rise when he signed his soul away to Stanley Kubrick. He'd just given a magnetic performance as the spoiled, seething yet sensitive Lord Bullingdon in the director's droll period epic Barry Lyndon (1975), and offers were pouring in. Instead of acting on them, Vitali decided he'd rather become Kubrick's devoted assistant. He had been lucky enough to earn the good graces of a true master, he reasoned, and you don't let true masters out of your life. Instead, Vitali allowed Kubrick to subsume him into his.

As Beast's handheld camera careens around the isle of Jersey, it's nearly always focused on Moll (Jessie Buckley). But the movie also seems to live inside the young woman's head, which churns with feral intensity and adolescent bewilderment. And Moll, a breakout role for flame-haired Irish actress Buckley, may not even be this murder mystery's title character.

Michael Mayer's The Seagull, a fluid and faithful reading of the endlessly remounted stage play by Anton Chekhov, opens and closes with what looks like the same scene. The curtain has just gone down on a final act, and we hear clapping as the camera moves in to focus on leading lady Irina (Annette Bening, in superb command as always), flushed and beaming under the adulation she plainly can't get enough of. Until, that is, someone whispers troubling news in Irina's ear and rushes her away to — where else?

There are plenty of reasons why many consider Die Hard one of the great action films of the last 30 years: Bruce Willis' reinvention of the Western cowboy as wisecracking everyman, Alan Rickman as his slippery Eurotrash counterpart, the escalating tension within the confined space of a Los Angeles office tower, a script dense with quotable one-liners. But the primary reason is this simple: You always know where people and objects are in relation to each other.

Annette Bening has made her career in film and television, but she hasn't always been comfortable in front of the camera.

"For so many years I was really intimidated ... " she says. "I felt very comfortable on the stage ... I didn't really do movies 'till I was almost 30."

Now 59, Bening has "fallen in love" with filming. "You can get so many things across with the camera that one just can't do onstage," she says.

Benedict Cumberbatch, the deep-voiced, strikingly handsome actor whose roles have ranged from Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Strange, once said there were only two roles on his long-standing acting "bucket list."

One was Hamlet, a role he played in 2015. The other? Patrick Melrose, a role he tackles — and conquers — in a new Showtime miniseries beginning Saturday. Parts of it are wickedly funny; other parts are searingly dramatic. But all of it is riveting, and excellent.

Romy Hall has run out of time and hope. The protagonist of Rachel Kushner's third novel, 29 years old when we first meet her, has resigned herself to the likelihood that she'll die in prison; she's been sentenced to two life sentences for beating to death a man who stalked her. "I don't plan on living a long life," she says. "Or a short life, necessarily. I have no plans at all. The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don't exist, and then your plans are meaningless."

Some books — not many, but a few — are vastly affected by the moment in which you read them. Not moment in history, or in your life. I mean the exact circumstance in which you sit down and crack the spine. For me, Lara Feigel's Free Woman, a combination of memoir and Doris Lessing biography, is one of those books. I read it on a late-night train home from New York, in that public-private Amtrak silence, with my boyfriend asleep in my lap so that every few pages, I could look down and think, Are you obstructing my freedom?

In first grade, I was hospitalized with pneumonia for over a week. I remember having to take an antibiotic syrup that gave me acid reflux. Immediately after I swallowed it, my Korean immigrant mother spoon-fed me a homemade liquid with small pieces of boiled Korean pear (bae), spices, and honey. This was her take on baesuk, a Korean fruit punch/tea, that she brought to the hospital in a thermos. I remember it lulled my stomach and soothed my throat and chest.

Novel writers are encouraged to have an elevator pitch — a one-sentence summary of their book that will grab the attention of anyone stuck in a small space with them for the time it takes to move from one floor to the next. It's hard to do right, and some books just aren't high-concept enough to make it work. So when I say that Undead Girl Gang has the new-crowned queen of elevator pitches, it's worth paying attention: When girls start dying under suspicious circumstances, a teen witch raises the dead to figure out who done it and get revenge.

"I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave." That was one of the first questions that Zora Neale Hurston asked 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis when she traveled from New York to Mobile, Ala., to interview him in the summer of 1927.

Filmmaker siblings Jay and Mark Duplass grew up making movies using their father's VHS camera, but it wasn't until they were in their mid-to-late 20s that their artistic vision really fell into place.

Jay remembers one day in particular, when he was "pushing 30" and feeling frustrated with his desire to do the "impossible artist thing." That's the day his brother Mark announced that he was going to the store to buy tapes for their dad's video camera. Jay had to come up with an idea for a movie before he returned.

Slave narratives tend equally to fascinate and appall. They can represent history, red in tooth and claw, or, in the words of noted multiculturalist Lawrence W. Levine, "a mélange of accuracy and fantasy, of sensitivity and stereotype, of empathy and racism."