Glen Weldon
Glen Weldon is a host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. He reviews books, movies, comics and more for the NPR Arts Desk.
Over the course of his career, he has spent time as a theater critic, a science writer, an oral historian, a writing teacher, a bookstore clerk, a PR flack, a completely inept marine biologist and a slightly better-ept competitive swimmer.
Weldon is the author of two cultural histories: Superman: The Unauthorized Biography and The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, McSweeney's and more; his fiction has appeared in several anthologies and other publications. He is the recipient of an NEA Arts Journalism Fellowship, an Amtrak Writers' Residency, a Ragdale Writing Fellowship and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Fiction.
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A gay couple (Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci) take a trip through Great Britain's Lake District as they deal with the knowledge that one of them is dying. -
The great Alan Tudyk gets a role he can sink his sharp pointy alien teeth into on a darkly funny series boasting an ensemble cast of characters with surprisingly nuanced interpersonal histories. -
Watching musician/actor John Lurie paint and grumbly pontificate in an unnamed tropical locale is sometimes puzzling, often intriguing and always soothing. -
The sequel to 2017's Wonder Woman is bright, entertaining, frequently funny — and overstuffed with villain backstories that crowd out the action. -
If you could watch it at home in 2020, it's here — four NPR critics give their picks for the best in streaming or broadcast TV in a year when current events turned the industry upside down. -
The story is simple, the themes surprisingly complex, and the hand-drawn animation is stunning in this stylish tale of a young girl yearning for freedom. -
Riz Ahmed gives a quiet, intense and profoundly unsentimental performance as a rock drummer who suddenly loses his hearing and stubbornly refuses to accept it. -
The Showtime comedy series about three NASA astronauts-in-training at a mock moonbase in the desert vibrates on its own singular wavelength, but never generates laughs. -
Nothing's as it seems in this Amazon series, which (sort of) re-teams Nick Frost and Simon Pegg for a gently funny and sometimes scary tale about a team of paranormal investigators. -
Netflix's adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's swooning gothic novel strips it of subtext — and sex — and tacks on a ending that misunderstands the "romance" at its center.
