Bob Mondello
Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.
For more than three decades, Mondello has reviewed movies and covered the arts for NPR, seeing at least 300 films annually, then sharing critiques and commentaries about the most intriguing on NPR's award-winning newsmagazine All Things Considered. In 2005, he conceived and co-produced NPR's eight-part series "American Stages," exploring the history, reach, and accomplishments of the regional theater movement.
Mondello has also written about the arts for USA Today, The Washington Post, Preservation Magazine, and other publications, and has appeared as an arts commentator on commercial and public television stations. He spent 25 years reviewing live theater for Washington City Paper, DC's leading alternative weekly, and to this day, he remains enamored of the stage.
Before becoming a professional critic, Mondello learned the ins and outs of the film industry by heading the public relations department for a chain of movie theaters, and he reveled in film history as advertising director for an independent repertory theater.
Asked what NPR pieces he's proudest of, he points to an April Fool's prank in which he invented a remake of Citizen Kane, commentaries on silent films — a bit of a trick on radio — and cultural features he's produced from Argentina, where he and his husband have a second home.
An avid traveler, Mondello even spends his vacations watching movies and plays in other countries. "I see as many movies in a year," he says, "as most people see in a lifetime."
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Films used to get a boost at the box office from Academy Award nominations — and the bounce still exists for films hanging on at the multiplex. But changes in the industry are altering the calculus. -
Authors Isaac Butler and Dan Kois celebrate Angels in a new book, The World Only Spins Forward, that collects the memories of everyone from playwright Tony Kushner to former Rep. Barney Frank.
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Thanks to movies, novels and TV, Bob Mondello knows what a contested convention would be like: raucous crowd, oppressive din and (if movies are any guide) Angela Lansbury scheming in the corner. -
A scrap of a play written in part by Shakespeare answers contemporaries who were angry that England was admitting religious refugees. -
Critic Bob Mondello has never been to Iowa, but he learned a lot about the state from The Music Man. The classic American musical follows a travelling salesman who finds himself in River City, Iowa. -
NPR film critic Bob Mondello has been listening to the Star Wars hype train. Here's why he isn't climbing aboard. -
When NPR's movie critic sat down to write this year's best-of list, he kept seeing matched sets: two cinematic head trips, two brutal historical epics and even two riveting mortgage crisis flicks.
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For our "Ones That Got Away" series, NPR film critic Bob Mondello checks out Chimes at Midnight, an Orson Welles masterpiece that hasn't been available in the U.S. for decades. -
NPR's Bob Mondello reviews Son of Saul, a Hungarian film about 24 hours in the life of one man trying to bury the body of a boy under the most dire of situations. -
The Lady in the Van is the true story of a homeless woman who moved into a playwright's driveway for three weeks and stayed for 15 years. NPR film critic Bob Mondello says it's both funny and frail.
