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Film director Robert Altman died Monday at the age of 81. Altman was the man behind MASH, Gosford Park and, most recently, A Prairie Home Companion.

The U.S. entertainment industry provides billions of people around the world with their primary impressions of American culture. At the same time, anti-American sentiment is rising. Experts debate what relationship, if any, exists between these two phenomena.

Parents may feel they have two choices when they go to buy video games for their kids: blood-splattered escapades starring burly men or nauseatingly fluffy titles. Don't despair: There are plenty of overlooked puzzlers, non-violent action games and quality sports contests.

New York-based NPR station WFUV gathered year-in-review lists from an assortment of musicians (Josh Ritter, Erin McKeown, G. Love, Sondre Lerche and Pete Yorn) and veteran station host Vin Scelsa, with an emphasis on both new faces and rediscovered old ones.

An article in Smithsonian magazine examines how artists were enlisted to sculpt new faces for soldiers disfigured in World War I.

After decades of success, director Martin Scorsese has his first Oscar. His film The Departed also won Best Picture. Among actors, Forest Whitaker was honored for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, Helen Mirren for The Queen.

There is a moment in the Oscar-nominated film The Queen that is known to some simply as "The Stag Scene." In the sequence, Helen Mirren, as Elizabeth II, sits on a hill in the lush Balmoral countryside, brought to tears. Then she sees the stag.

Ken Burns has drawn criticism in the past for omissions to his PBS series on baseball and jazz. Now the documentary filmmaker is drawing fire for leaving Hispanics and Native Americans out of his 14-hour World War II story.

Critic-at-large John Powers reflects on what he thinks is the single greatest movie ever made about the city of Los Angeles — Killer of Sheep, an independent film made in the late '70s by Charles Burnett. It's on the Library of Congress' National Film Registry; it will be showing in selected theaters in the next few months, and it comes out on DVD this September.

Jack Valenti died Thursday at the age of 85. He was the former president of the Motion Picture Association of America, and an influential person in American culture for decades.