There was remarkably little rust on Shonda Rhimes’s GREY’S ANATOMY in its 14th season.  The series, now under the showrunning stewardship of longtime writer/producer Krista Vernoff (Rhimes herself is leaving ABC Studios for Netflix, but will continue to be in uber-charge), smoothly balanced its huge cast of regulars and recurring characters through 24 episodes […]

  DESTROYER (Annapurna – Dec. 25):  Another fractured-time thriller, this one trickier than most, because the script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi features a sort of time-loop within a loop.  All that structural fanciness aside, Destroyer is mostly a vehicle for Nicole Kidman’s aggressively deglamorized performance as an end-of-the-line LAPD detective named Erin Bell.  […]

  THE PASSAGE:  Monday 9PM on FOX FOX’s THE PASSAGE does to Justin Cronin’s intricate, elaborate trilogy of postapocalyptic thrillers what Hollywood has traditionally done with literary fiction, flattening the books in the most conventional way possible.  This wasn’t the original plan, or even the second:  Ridley Scott’s production company acquired Cronin’s books with the […]

  There was never a real-life game of thrones behind the scenes at GAME OF THRONES, and perhaps there should have been.  After six brilliant years adapting George R. R. Martin’s novels to television, series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss found themselves out of books and without a clear path to Martin’s ending.  (Reportedly, […]

  HUMAN FACTORS:  Is Ronny Trocker’s Human Factors intended as a political allegory?  The married couple at its center are the German Jan (Mark Waschke) and the French Nina (Sabine Timoteo), and there’s a plot point about whether the ad agency they run will take on a political party as a client.  If that’s the […]

  HONK FOR JESUS.  SAVE YOUR SOUL (no distrib):  Scandal-ridden mega-churches aren’t exactly fresh territory for screens big (The Tears of Tammy Faye) or small (The Righteous Gemstones), with tones that range from wildly comic to solemn.  Adamma Edo’s feature debut doesn’t have much to add to the subject, but it does have Sterling K. […]

  THE ZONE OF INTEREST (A24 – TBD):  Jonathan Glazer has only directed 4 feature films in his 23-year career (the most recent was Under the Skin a decade ago).  His latest, The Zone of Interest, is a work of formal brilliance, although unlikely to be to the taste of mainstream audiences.  So rigorous and painstaking in its […]

  These haven’t been glory days for the Toronto Film Festival.  The WGA/SAG strikes dampened the vibe, of course–of the 27 films I saw at TIFF, only 4 screenings featured appearances from the cast.  Beyond that, for whatever reasons, TIFF also wasn’t favored by the studios with some of the major releases that instead opted […]