M-I-C-K-E-Y will soon belong to you and me.

With several asterisks, qualification and caveats, Mickey Mouse in his earliest form will be the leader of the band of characters, films and books that will become public domain as the year turns to 2024.

FBI investigators are planning to exhume the body of a young woman whose unsolved 1969 killing has been a source of widespread speculation, especially since Netflix's documentary series "The Keepers" examined the slaying of a Baltimore nun that unfolded days earlier under eerily similar circumstances.

Joyce Malecki went Christmas shopping in November 1969 at a suburban mall outside Baltimore and never came home. Her body was found on a nearby military base days later and an autopsy determined she had been strangled.

If anything about Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" annoys you, best to avoid shopping malls now. Or the radio. Maybe music altogether, for that matter.

Her 1994 carol dominates holiday music like nothing else.

Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" dominated the Golden Globe Awards nominations with nine nods for the blockbuster film, including best picture musical or comedy as well as acting nominations for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and three of its original songs.

It was closely followed by its release date and meme companion Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer," which scored eight nominations, including best picture drama and for actors Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt.

Your Google search history for 2023 has arrived.

Well, actually, the world's. On Monday, the California-based tech giant released its "Year in Search," a roundup of 2023's top global queries, ranging from unforgettable pop culture moments (hello, Barbenheimer ), to the loss of beloved figures and tragic news carrying worldwide repercussions.

It is sickly hilarious to make a movie in which so much consensual sex is had, often so gleefully, that is not the least bit sexy. Though Bella Baxter's insatiable libido might be her guiding light at first in "Poor Things," sexual liberation (or "furious jumping," as she calls it) is only part of this fantastical, anarchic journey to consciousness.

Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and his star, Emma Stone, have a good and strange thing going whether she's playing a striving scullery maid who works her way into the favor of Queen Anne, or a re-animated Victorian woman finding independence. Stone helps make his black humor more accessible, and he creates unorthodox opportunities for her to play and stretch. We, the audience, are the benefactors.

In weather terminology, they call it "rapid intensification" — the process by which a storm strengthens dramatically in a short period.

In pop culture terminology, they call it Taylor Swift.

When Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said in his introductory remarks: "We are privileged enough to be living in a time where Mozart is composing symphonies."

You might be tempted to call that hyperbole, but — this being Miyazaki, the legendary anime filmmaker of "Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" — it's closer to fact. The occurrence of a new film from Miyazaki deserves to be treated like the coming of a seldom-seen comet or something rarer still, like a winning New York Jets season.

A lawyer for Prince Harry on Tuesday challenged the British government's decision to strip him of his security detail after he gave up his status as a working member of the royal family and moved to the United States.

The Duke of Sussex has claimed that his safety is jeopardized in part because of hostility toward him and his family on social media and a relentless press that hounds him.

From a hot dog vendor to head of the formidable mercenary army Wagner Group, his rise through Russian society could easily be described as meteoric. But it all came to a sudden end when the plane carrying him and others mysteriously exploded.