Author Archive
 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “London Road”

  LONDON ROAD may have seemed marginally less odd as the stage musical it originally was.  No matter how naturalistic a play may be, the mechanics of theatre make it somewhat stylized, and that may have brought the show&#...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “A Tale of Love and Darkness”

  Natalie Portman certainly hasn’t made it easy for herself with her debut as a writer/director, A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS.  The film, which premiered at Cannes (but tellingly, doesn’t yet have a US distribu...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Premiere Review: “You’re The Worst”

  YOU’RE THE WORST:  Wednesday 10:30PM on FXX The secret shame of Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash), the protagonists of YOU’RE THE WORST, is that they’re far more conventional than they’...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”

  The world of television may have undergone a revolution over the past decade, but it hasn’t hit the continent of late-night network talk shows, which have introduced variations from their 1950s-era formats, but lit...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “The Last Ship”

  Despite an underwhelming season finale that favored sentiment over action until the closing seconds, THE LAST SHIP had a fairly smooth second voyage.  (The show, one of TNT’s highest-rated originals, has already b...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

Behind the US/Worldwide Weekend Box Office: “War Room” Conquers “Compton”

  Note:  Because of the holiday weekend and consequent strong Sunday, weekend-to-weekend drops will look softer than usual. OPENINGS:  It was a weak battle of newcomers, with A WALK IN THE WOODS (Broad Green) ahead at $8...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

EARLY FRIDAY BOX OFFICE: Hollywood Takes The Holiday Off

  Labor Day weekend is always the exhausted last gasp of the summer movie season, but this year the studios didn’t even try.  Partly it’s the effect of August having generally been a disaster in 2015 (last yea...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “Mistresses”

  MISTRESSES faced some challenges in its 3rd season.  Two were interrelated:  for budget reasons, the network and studio decided to relocate the production to Vancouver, and that prompted marquee star Alyssa Milano to d...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “Mr. Robot”

  Great TV dramas tend to arrive on our screens fully-formed.  (The same isn’t true of comedies, which sometimes take an entire season to find their voices.)  By the end of the first hours of The Sopranos, Mad Men,...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “Tyrant”

  TYRANT went all the way back to the source for its main plotline this season, giving Bassam Al-Fayeed (Adam Rayner) a saga so Moses-like that he might as well have witnessed a burning bush along the way.  Bassam was sen...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “Scream”

  The MTV version of SCREAM nailed its own problem back in the pilot, courtesy of its one-man meta machine Noah (John Karna)–but diagnosing one’s own illness is a long way from curing it.  A TV series, indeed,...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “The Whispers”

  THE WHISPERS never made much sense, and that went triple for tonight’s finale.  On a macro level, it was probably unwise to end the season with a cliffhanger, since reports are that although the ratings were no wo...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Pilot + 1 Review: “Fear the Walking Dead”

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 6PM on AMC   Previously… on FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Something odd is happening in Los Angeles, years before and a continent away from Rick Grimes and his troupe of survivors. ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Finale Review: “Falling Skies”

  The past two seasons of FALLING SKIES have been something of a wreck, all the way through to tonight’s flat finale, and with its ratings echoing the show’s title, it’s hard to regard the show’s de...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

Behind the US/Worldwide Weekend Box Office – 8/30/15

  OPENINGS:  Every time a Christian movie sells some tickets, the pundits treat it as though they’ve seen… well, a miracle.  But at this point there have been plenty of these “miracles,” and peopl...
by Mitch Salem