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Don Cheadle plays "Petey" Greene, an ex-con turned talk-radio DJ in '60s D.C.; when riots explode after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the loudmouth with a past discovers he's got the street cred to help a burning city bring itself back under control.

David Edelstein says Sicko is Michael Moore's best film yet, Ratatouille towers like an Eiffel among animated comedies and the latest Die Hard doesn't make you want to — quite.

In this week's roundup of reviews for the week's new movies from the online magazine Slate, we hear about Live Free or Die Hard, Ratatouille and Sicko.

Fresh Air's critic says the fifth Harry Potter film trades the last glimmers of childish wonder for a brooding, paranoid darkness, a grainy palette and a series of horrific montages — and it's the best Potter film yet.

Special-effects magic makes Hasbro's toys enormously engaging, but the humans they're out to destroy keep slowing things down. If this film were a lot shorter, and if it kept a focus on the toys, it would be hard to argue with.

Rescue Dawn is Werner Herzog's first Hollywood feature; it's a dramatic retelling of the story he told in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. His other films include Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Heart of Glass, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu. This interview first aired on Oct. 27, 1998.

Kenneth Turan says director Brad Bird did something audacious — made a major motion picture with a rat for a star. The comedy they've created is imaginative, good-spirited, funny — and brave enough to let the rats be ratlike, even as they charm the audience.

Playwright David E. Talbert is on a star hunt for the next big actors in black urban theater. And he's taking that search to TV in the new reality series, Stage Black.

Comedian and actor Patton Oswalt stars in Ratatouille, the new animated feature from Pixar. He's also a writer and stand-up comic, who starred in his own comedy specials and appeared in the TV shows The King of Queens and Reno 911! He'll release a new comedy album, called Werewolves and Lollipops, on July 10.

She was a home-grown phenomenon, an operatic soprano trained entirely in the U.S. in an era when most singers developed their craft in Europe, and she made a notable second career after her retirement as a formidable arts administrator and advocate. Fresh Air spoke with her in 1985.