Sometimes it takes the briefest glimpse of something to make its absence so scandalously obvious.

Consider: Midway through the film "Talk to Me," which opens Friday and stars Don Cheadle as the legendary Washington disc jockey Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, a remarkable scene transpires in which, in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Greene tries to calm a city in flames. As the sequence plays, and the fires climb higher on 14th and U, it becomes almost a movie-within-a-movie, evoking the meaning of King's life and death in just a scant few moments.

The scene (which admittedly takes some liberties with chronology) also reminds viewers that, while familiar images of King are commonplace in 1960s montage sequences, Hollywood has yet to make the definitive King biopic. Indeed, of all the social, cultural and political touchstones of the baby boom generation -- World War II, the Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam War,...

IN 1997 Bruce Young, a collector of memorabilia from the early phonograph era, placed a newly acquired 100-year-old wax cylinder record on his Edison Standard Model D player and heard a surprising sound: a young man saying filthy words. It was a 2 minute 25 second poetic recitation, suggestively titled “The Virtues of Raw Oysters,” written in the voice of a sexually voracious woman. “I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for tonight, your dear little wife,” went one of the few lines suitable for newspaper quotation on a recording laced with curse words and hair-raising sexual slang.

"My wife and I just stared at each other in disbelief,” Mr. Young said, recalling that first listening session. “We were just amazed that that kind of language — what you think of as very naughty late-20th-century schoolyard talk — would exist in the 1800s.” Mr. Young realized that he had stumbled on one of the earliest examples of audio indecency: a 19th-century record worthy...

Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece set many of the ground rules for the sci-fi
epics to come, not just in the way it depicted a dystopic future, but also the
way it dealt with mad scientists and of course, their creations.
Depicting a world in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are literally
divided by the Earth's surface ˜ the elitists living above ground and the
workers living in the dark, dank caverns beneath the surface ˜ Maria is a robot
used by those in power to pry their way into the workers' world. A silver
machine created in a secret lab, Maria takes on the face and characteristics of
the female leader of that underground world, the one who the workers trust and
rally around. By controlling the robot, the surface-dwellers manage to control
the underground populace, turning Maria's words of uprising into words of
reassurance: Get back to work, and be happy.
One of the very first big-screen...

In January 1992, during a campaign stop at a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, George H. W. Bush made a commitment to strengthen traditional values, promising to help American families become "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." A few days later, before the opening credits rolled on the animated sitcom's weekly episode, The Simpsons issued its response. Seated in front of the television, the family watched Bush make his remarks. "Hey! We're just like the Waltons," said Bart. "We're praying for an end to the Depression, too." While the immediacy of the response was surprising, the retort was vintage Simpsons: tongue-in-cheek, subversive, skewering both the president's cartoonish political antics and the culture that embraced them. Twelve months later, Bill Clinton moved into the White House. The Waltons were out; the Simpsons were in.

When The Simpsons had premiered on Fox, in 1989, prime-time...

Frost/Nixon, the hot play in New York, makes for a highly enjoyable evening at the theater. The lead characters, famed talk-show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) and the exiled and disgraced Richard Nixon (Frank Langella, recently awarded a Tony), are wonderfully acted; the staging is simple but effective; there is a clear plotline with a dramatic ending.

But the play, the talented Peter Morgan's dramatization of Frost's wildly popular series of televised interviews, in 1977, with the former President, profoundly misleads as it entertains. Langella's Nixon is not the Richard Nixon of history, and the ending significantly alters what actually happened. It doesn't always matter when entertainment collides with history--but in this case it does.

The way these extraordinary interviews came about is accurately set forth: Frost, faced with a career on the skids, has the wit and the nerve to persuade Nixon, through Hollywood superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar...

The German Finance Ministry, the landlord of all public buildings, said yesterday that the filmmakers behind the Tom Cruise movie about the failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler could not use a memorial site as a location but said its decision was unrelated to Mr. Cruise’s adherence to Scientology, which the government regards as a dangerous cult, Reuters reported. The Finance Ministry said the filmmakers were welcome to make the movie, “Valkyrie,” in Germany, but not at the Bendler Block complex in Berlin, site of a memorial to Germans who resisted the Nazi regime. “We welcome the fact that such a film is being made,” said Stefan Olbermann, a spokesman for the Finance Ministry. “We don’t think it would be appropriate to film there.” Last week a spokesman for the German Defense Ministry told Reuters that the film would not be allowed access to sites, including part of the Defense Ministry in Berlin, where the plot was hatched. The spokesman objected to the casting of Mr. Cruise as Col....

Blink and you might miss the second series of Rome (Sundays and Wednesdays, 9pm, BBC2). We will be rattling through two episodes a week for the next five weeks. The bloodthirsty re-telling of the birth of the Roman empire focuses on the political players of the time and their almost universal fondness for sex and gouging. It is somewhat similar to watching Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous getting drunk and shouting at snooty shop girls: you would never do it yourself but it's terrific to watch.

The twice-weekly format, a regular technique for US networks, is presumably a response to a demographic now used to bingeing on an entire DVD box set in a weekend, or hoovering all 12 episodes off their Sky+ at the end of a run. Making viewers wait a week might risk losing ratings. Viewing figures for Rome's second episode were already an improvement on its first, so they must be doing something right.

FORTY years ago today, “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane cracked the Top 40. With it, and hits like “Light My Fire” by the Doors, 1967’s Summer of Love blossomed. And 40 years later, the media is still commemorating it.

From Rolling Stone to VH1 to an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the summer of Summer of Love nostalgia is again upon us, complete with the obligatory images of dancing flower children.

By comparison, hardly anyone seems sentimental for the summer of 1997. Tastemakers recall the album “OK Computer” by Radiohead, and head-spinning techno singles by the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers. But for most people, it was the summer that established the Spice Girls and boy bands, which only the most hard-core Justin Timberlake fan would recall fondly.

Yet the time has come for a look back at those disreputable months of a decade ago, and not simply because some of its biggest hits have held up better than expected. For...