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NPR's Bob Mondello says similarities often emerge among movies sharing a season, and that is especially apparent this year. The most obvious are the 19th-century war movies (Master and Commander, The Last Samurai, and Cold Mountain) -- but there are more obscure trends, like films that include a dead child in their plots (Mystic River, In America, 21 Grams).

A softly lit oil portrait of a young woman with a pearl earring is one of Johannes Vermeer's best-known paintings. The new film Girl with a Pearl Earring brings the story behind the famous image to the silver screen. Los Angeles Times and Morning Edition film critic Kenneth Turan has a review.

Hip-hop and R&B acts dominate the field of nominees for this year's Grammy awards, announced Thursday. Beyonce, Jay-Z, OutKast and Pharrell Williams each earned six nominations. Hear NPR's Michele Norris and music writer Tom Moon.

NPR's Adrian Florido speaks with Jose Cintron, a middle school teacher in Puerto Rico, about the teachers' ongoing strikes to demand better wages and pensions.

A new movie is selling out theaters in Iran but angering some of the country's religious leaders. Government censors delayed the release of The Lizard, and some leading clerics want it banned altogether. Hear NPR's Steve Inskeep and journalist Roxana Saberi.

We remember actor, producer, author and comedian Alan King, who died Sunday. He was 76. King died in Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Medical Center of lung cancer. He was known for his wry observations on suburbia and life at large.

Residents of Normandy, France, old enough to remember the 1944 invasion are being encouraged to come forward and share their memories. As the 60th anniversary of D-Day in June approaches, towns and villages across the region are holding meetings in an effort to record the testimony of those who lived through the Nazi occupation and the liberation. Alasdair Sandford reports.

NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Jack Weatherford about his new book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Weatherford has spent the past eight years in Mongolia researching the man he deems the greatest ruler the world has ever seen. He says that Khan was not the stereotypical barbarian of lore, calling him a statesman responsible for laying the foundations for global trade and diplomacy.

Graham Parker's sarcasm and anger were the trademark of his Squeezing Out Sparks. Nearly three decades after making quintessential bar-band rock with his group The Rumour, the sharp-tongued Englishman releases a more folksy, roots-oriented CD called Your Country. Meredith Ochs has a review.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum's new exhibit, "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," takes a chilling look at the Nazi use of eugenics and its applications. The term "eugenics" comes from the Greek word meaning "well-born." In the 20th century, it came to mean something far more sinister: a scientific movement to create a more perfect race. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports.