  We study holographic entanglement entropy and revisit thermodynamics and
confinement in the dilaton-gravity system. Our analysis focuses on a solvable
class of backgrounds that includes AdS and linear dilaton spacetimes as
particular cases, with some results extended to general warped metrics. A
general lesson is that the behavior of the holographic theory is tied to the
bulk curvature singularities. We find that a singular background is confining
if and only if i) the singularity coincides with a boundary or ii) it is the
linear dilaton. In the former case, for which the singularity cuts off
spacetime, we demonstrate that both entanglement entropy and thermodynamics
exhibit a first order phase transition. In the linear dilaton case we find
instead that both entanglement entropy and thermal phase transitions are of
second order. Additionally, along the process we thoroughly derive the radion
effective action at quadratic order.
