Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

  It seems as though just about all the impact of TV’s May finales has been subsumed into the maw that is Game of Thrones–even including The Big Bang Theory, itself one of the signature hits of the last decade.  One of the victims is HBO’s own VEEP, a multi-Emmy-winning jewel in the network’s crown, […]

  WATCHMEN:  Sunday 9PM on HBO The Damon Lindelof/HBO WATCHMEN provides a new wrinkle to the world of IP exploitation.  It’s not an adaptation of the classic Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel (a la Zack Snyder’s all-too-reverent 2009 film) or even a reboot, but a newly conceived work that’s more like a spin-off or a […]

  A year ago, the idea of a “virtual film festival” would have seemed extremely far-fetched, but it’s become a regular practice in pandemic times.  The latest festival to take this path is Sundance, which in some ways is well-suited for this new normal, since it’s less built around starry galas than others.  (And there’s […]

  NANNY (no distrib):  Think Netflix’s Maid, but as a (sort of) horror movie.  Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant in New York who works as a nanny for the daughter of a well-off couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), in order to earn money she can send to her young […]

  THE PERSIAN VERSION (Sony Classics):  Maryam Keshavarz’s dramedy won the Sundance Audience Award in the US Dramatic Competition, and it’s a smart mixture of broad comedy and family drama.  The comedy is mostly set in the present day, where aspiring filmmaker Leila (Layla Mohammadi), tries to keep her distance from her mother Shireen (Niousha […]