CRAZY STUPID LOVE – Worth A Ticket:  It All Works     Without further ado:  CRAZY STUPID LOVE is the comedy of the summer.  Also the drama.  There are certainly spectacles out there now providing fantastic visual thrills, and some of them (X-Men, Harry Potter) are quite good, too; but if you […]

  House of Cards Season 2 Eps 1-3 Review Here. Eps 4-7 Review Here. Eps 8-10 Review Here. It’s a paradox of the Netflix version of HOUSE OF CARDS that in many ways, its least interesting character is the one at its center.  Pick the wildlife metaphor of choice:  Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is a […]

  Season 4 of HAVEN was its most ambitious by far.  Under showrunners Matt McGuinness and Gabrielle Stanton, the series delved into its own mythology more deeply than it ever has before, moving past its initial rote Trouble-of-the-week structure to introduce some important new characters while radically shifting others.  All was not revealed, of course, […]

  One of the many ways in which broadcast networks have started to resemble their cable counterparts is in the structure of a series season.  For years, cable has aired its shows, especially serialized series, in clearly-defined, repeat-free mini-seasons, with different programming in those slots during hiatus periods, rather than following the historical broadcast model […]

    HAYWIRE:  Worth A Ticket – For the Gasp-Inducing Fight Scenes Alone   You might think that if a major, celebrated filmmaker were to take the extraordinary step of announcing, years in advance, that he had set the time for his retirement from movies, and that, even though he was only middle-aged, he would […]

  THE ASSETS:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Previously… on THE ASSETS:  In 1980s Washington, the hunt is on for a CIA agent who’s actually a mole for the KGB.  But there’s no mystery for viewers, who know that the double agent is Aldrich Ames (Paul Rhys).  The agent who doesn’t know, and has been tasked […]

  CHICAGO FIRE: Wednesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel Network television doesn’t come more dully generic than NBC’s “new” CHICAGO FIRE, a series that seems to be assembling itself out of old film clips even as you watch it.  In its time of need, NBC turned to one of its most prolific and […]

  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN:  Watch It At Home – Not So Amazing   Part of the unwritten suspension of disbelief deal we have with the movie studios is that although we know they’re going to constantly tell us new versions of the same old stories for as long as we’ll buy tickets, they won’t abuse […]