Prosecutors won’t charge director Roman Polanski after molestation report

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Nick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. Read the full review.

Jordan Strauss / AP

"Blonde" is a critique of materialism with Frank Ocean employing two distinct voices, like characters in a play, a recurring theme throughout the album and perhaps its finest sonic achievement. A party spirals out of control, the music rich but low key, a melange of organ and hovering synthesizers. Ocean uses distorting devices on his voice to add emotional texture and to enhance and sharpen the characters he briefly embodies. The upshot: They're all little slices of Ocean's personality with a role to play and they each sound distinct. Read the full review.

Not many albums could survive Ed Sheeran performing reggae, but Pharrell Williams always took chances — not all of them successful — in N.E.R.D.Despite the Sheeran gaffe, "No One Ever Really Dies," the band's first album in seven years, is a typically diverse, trippy ride from the group that established Williams' career as a performer in the early 2000s alongside Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. Read the full review.

Nuccio DiNuzzo / baiduhai

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Matt Kennedy / AP

Washington D.C. power brokers Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) and Lynne Cheney have a date with destiny in Adam McKay's "Vice," co-starring Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. Read the review. Nomainted for: Best Picture, Best Actor for Christian Bale, Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell, Best Supporting Actress for Amy Adams, Best Director for Adam McKay, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing,

Atsushi Nishijima / AP

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On "Here" (Merge), the band's first album in six years and 10th overall, the front line of Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley once again trades songs (four each) and lead vocals, over sturdily constructed pop-rock arrangements. But the band has taken some subtle evolutionary turns to where it's now a faint shadow of its "Bandwagonesque" incarnation. Read the review.

NBC

Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" (GOOD/Def Jam) sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished album. It's a mess, more a series of marketing opportunities in which West changed the album title and the track listing multiple times, to the point where the very thing that made West tolerable despite a penchant for tripping over his own ego — the music itself — became anti-climactic. Read the review.

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By Associated Press

PUBLISHED: January 8, 2018 at 8:45 PM CST | UPDATED: December 17, 2018 at 10:33 PM CST

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Los Angeles prosecutors will not bring criminal charges against Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski after a woman said he molested her in 1975 — when she was 10 years old — because the allegations are too old.

A district attorney’s office memo obtained by The Associated Press on Monday says prosecutors were declining to bring charges in the case because the statute of limitations had expired.

The 84-year-old Polanski has been a fugitive since fleeing to France in 1978 while awaiting sentencing for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old.

The latest allegations were reported to police in October. The woman said she was molested during a photo shoot in 1975 after Polanski had her pose nude.

Polanski’s attorney, Harland Braun, has said the allegations are untrue.

4 women accuse filmmaker Paul Haggis of sexual misconduct, including two rapes

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