THE CHILDREN ACT (no distrib):  It’s not intended as disparagement to Ian McEwan’s novel and screenplay adaptation, or to Richard Eyre’s film, that THE CHILDREN ACT feels much of the time like it could be the pilot for a high-toned television series featuring Emma Thompson as a compassionate jurist specializing in family law who […]

There are certain inevitabilities at Sundance, apart from snow:  something will go wrong (after I waited on line for 2 hours on opening day, the box office discovered that it had lost one of my passes), and no matter how carefully one chooses one’s film selections, some of the hottest titles will be missed.  For […]

  It was clear from the pilot of NBC’s GOOD GIRLS that the series had a trio of strong assets and some major challenges.  The strengths were its three stars, Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman, each of them thoroughly capable of anchoring a show on her own, and together an Avengers-like powerhouse of warmth, […]

  IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (Annapurna – November 30):  Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight received a rapturous standing ovation at its Toronto premiere, and it’s unquestionably a beautiful piece of filmmaking,  Jenkins reunited with most of his Moonlight creative team, including cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Britell, and with a higher budget at […]

  The first half of The Walking Dead‘s 9th season included so many major changes that its ratings continuing their general downward trend rather than collapsing entirely may count as a sort of moral victory, even though the numbers are now at series lows.  New showrunner Angela Kang had 8 episodes to cover a whole […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Concerns have been as high as expectations for the final season of GAME OF THRONES.  Season 7, the first with little recourse to George R. R. Martin’s novels due to the lagging rate of his writing, was generally considered a warning of trouble ahead, with a pace […]

  ALMOST FAMILY:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX Whether we like it or not, the strongest lead-in on broadcast television right now is The Masked Singer, which makes it somewhat surprising that FOX has given the precious slot afterward to the mess that ALMOST FAMILY appears to be.  Even more surprising is that the lead producer […]

  ONE SECOND (Neon – TBD):  Zhang Yimou’s film was notoriously the subject of controversy with the Chinese government, which held it back from its originally scheduled film festival debut in 2019, and forced some reediting and even reshooting, so one assumes that in its initial version, the story, set during the Cultural Revolution, was […]