AP National Entertainment News

By HILLEL ITALIE AP National Writer NEW YORK (AP) — Former FBI director James Comey says that he’s still a bit bewildered over how a seemingly innocent Instagram shot of shells arranged in the sand led to allegations by Donald Trump among others that he was calling for the president’s assassination and to an interview

By ANDREW DALTON AP Entertainment Writer Salt-N-Pepa are telling their record label not to push it as they fight for the rights to their music. The groundbreaking duo behind hip-hop classics including 1993’s “Shoop” and 1987’s “Push It” say in a lawsuit that Universal Music Group is violating copyright law by refusing to agree to

By WILL WEISSERT Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump hosted the Kennedy Center ‘s leadership at the White House on Monday night, reinforcing how much attention he’s devoting to remaking a premier cultural center as part of a larger effort to overhaul the social and ideological dynamics of the national arts scene. The

PARIS (AP) — Pierpaolo Piccioli, who left Valentino last year, is the new creative director of the iconic fashion house Balenciaga, parent company Kering announced Monday. He replaces Demna, who joined Balenciaga in 2015 and has since moved to Gucci in a shake-up of Kering’s creative stable. Gucci is also owned by Kering. Piccioli takes

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — Denzel Washington sandwiched a whirlwind trip to the Cannes Film Festival, in between Broadway performances, for the premiere of Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” on Monday — and was rewarded with a surprise: an honorary Palme d’Or. Cannes had flipped around some of its scheduling

By DAVID BAUDER AP Media Writer CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon said Monday that she is resigning after four years, the latest fallout at the network as its parent company considers settling a lawsuit with President Donald Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with his former political opponent. McMahon, who has led both the network

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — Akinola Davies Jr. and his brother Wale were both toddlers when their father died. Many years later, they began thinking about an idea for movie: What if they had gotten to spend a day with him? In “My Father’s Shadow,” which is playing in the

NEW YORK (AP) — Netflix has thrown “Sesame Street” a safety net with a new streaming deal that offers the popular children’s staple a broad reach while keeping it on its long-standing home, PBS, at the same time, the companies announced Monday. Starting later this year, new episodes will run on Netflix, PBS and the

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” So asks a character in one of the most-talked about films of the 78th Cannes Film Festival: Oliver Laxe’s “Sirât,” a Moroccan desert road trip through, we come to learn, a World War III purgatory.

By HILLEL ITALIE AP National Writer NEW YORK (AP) — This year’s winners of the Gotham Book Prize celebrate New York City as experienced on foot, bus and train. Ian Frazier, author of “Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough,” and Nicole Gelinas, who wrote “Movement: New York’s Long War to

By LINDSEY BAHR AP Film Writer Death is not looming for the “Final Destination” franchise at the box office. Its sixth installment, “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” drew big crowds to movie theaters this weekend and easily topped the domestic charts with $51 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday. The movie earned the same

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — When Richard Linklater first started thinking about making a film about the French New Wave, he figured he’d show it all everywhere except one place. “I thought: They’ll hate that an American director did this,” Linklater said Sunday. “We’ll show this film all over the

By PHILIPP JENNE and KIRSTEN GRIESHABER Associated Press VIENNA (AP) — Austrian fans enthusiastically welcomed classically trained singer JJ back home at Vienna airport on Sunday after he won the 69th Eurovision Song Contest with “Wasted Love.” As JJ walked through the gate, hundreds of fans cheered, some played his song and others surrounded the

By ANDREW DALTON AP Entertainment Writer “Saturday Night Live” was more reflective than festive in the final episode of its 50th season. Scarlett Johansson, who set a record for a woman with her seventh appearance as host, used her monologue to lead most of the current cast of the NBC sketch institution in a song

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — Wes Anderson isn’t driving the bus. Laurent is. That’s the name of the driver who’s bringing Anderson, and his bus, to the Cannes Film Festival. As they drive from his home in Paris to the South of France, Anderson explains by phone: “I don’t drive

MIAMI (AP) — Antonio Brown was briefly detained by police early Saturday following an altercation in which gunshots were fired outside a celebrity boxing event in Miami, according to the former NFL star and video posted to social media. Miami police confirmed in a written statement that officers responded to the area at about 3

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — Kristen Stewart has been talking about directing as long as she’s been acting. Not many people encouraged it. “I spoke to other actors when I was really little because I was always like: ‘I want to direct movies!’” Stewart recalls. “I was fully set down

By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press BASEL, Switzerland (AP) — Classically trained Austrian singer JJ won the 69th Eurovision Song Contest in Switzerland on Saturday with “Wasted Love,” a song that combines operatic, multi-octave vocals with a techno twist. Israeli singer Yuval Raphael came second at an exuberant celebration of music and unity that was shadowed

By BRIAN MELLEY Associated Press LONDON (AP) — A fellow musician and friend of Chris Brown has been charged alongside the Grammy-winning singer on allegations they beat and seriously injured a music producer at a London nightclub in 2023, police said Saturday. Omololu Akinlolu, 38, who performs under the name “Hoody Baby,” was due to

By STEFANIE DAZIO Associated Press BERLIN (AP) — Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is playing a single game of chess against 140,000 people worldwide in a mega-match that could overturn expectations by ending in a draw in the next few days. Billed as “Magnus Carlsen vs. The World,” the online match began April 4 on Chess.com,

BASEL, Switzerland (AP) — Sprinkle on the sequins or settle down on the sofa: It’s time to find out who will be crowned champion at the 69th Eurovision Song Contest. Acts from more than two dozen countries will take the stage in Basel, Switzerland on Saturday to vie for glory through a 3-minute pop song.

NEW YORK (AP) — Testimony in the sex trafficking trial of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs began this week, opening a window into what prosecutors say was the sordid world of group sex, drugs and violence beneath the glittering, jet set persona cultivated by the Bad Boy Records founder. Much of the testimony was hard

By PATRICK WHITTLE Associated Press FREEDOM, Maine (AP) — Heather Donahue is walking through the woods once again. The star of the successful low-budget horror movie “ The Blair Witch Project ” has an on-screen history of getting into scary situations in a forest. But this time she is merely picking up an old soda

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — Kazuo Ishiguro ‘s mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of “Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go,” first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982’s “A Pale View of

By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer CANNES, France (AP) — Ari Aster’s COVID-era Western “Eddington,” about a 2020 America quickly losing its mind to conspiracy theories, TikTok and political extremism, premiered to a mixed reception at the Cannes Film Festival. “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix as a muddled, mistake-prone sheriff who runs for mayor in a