X-MEN:  DAYS OF FUTURE PAST:  Buy A Ticket – For Once, The Script Is As Mighty As the CG After the money-making meatball that was Godzilla, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST serves welcome notice that a movie can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, be crammed with CG-generated spectacle, and still have room for an […]

  GANG-RELATED:  Thursday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel I think my favorite cliche in the pilot for FOX’s burn-off drama GANG-RELATED–out of, believe me, plenty of choices–comes at the end of an argument between a fiery Assistant District Attorney (Shantal VanSanten) and the head of the show’s inter-agency Gang Task Force (Terry O’Quinn).  […]

  In its second season, THE AMERICANS continued to be a expertly crafted saga of betrayals, both political and personal.  Tonight’s chilling season finale, written by series creator Joe Weisberg and his co-showrunner Joel Fields, and directed by Daniel Sackheim, brought all its themes together brilliantly, and set the stage for what should be an […]

  MOTIVE:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC Welcome to summer network TV. The broadcast networks talk a good game about the new 12-months-a-year world of television–and to its credit, CBS has been relatively ambitious with Under the Dome and this summer’s Extant, a sci-fi thriller starring Halle Berry–but for the most part, once May sweeps end, […]

  A return visit to LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT on the occasion of its 15th season finale revealed a procedural that had gone positively soapy–possibly a result of creator Dick Wolf’s recent success with his more serialized Chicago pair of series. Both of the cases covered in the hour, which was written by […]

  REVOLUTION was sort of a sad story.  The lights-are-out sci-fi adventure was NBC’s top priority in Fall 2012, promoted like crazy and given the network’s prized post-The Voice timeslot.  At first the show looked like the hit NBC desperately needed, but once it started dropping in late fall it didn’t stop, and by the […]

  Like a middle schooler suddenly realizing that final exams are around the corner, the mostly tired 9th season of BONES went into overdrive tonight to deliver a super-dramatic season finale. The season had inherited a bummer of a cliffhanger from Season 8:  Booth (David Boreanaz) was blackmailed by petulant recurring serial killer Pelant (Christopher […]

  There was so much going on in tonight’s finale of the sensational fifth season of THE GOOD WIFE, it felt at times like a 2-hour episode that had been forced at gunpoint to strip down to a single hour.  There was barely enough time for Veronica (Stockard Channing), the irresponsibly direct mother of Alicia […]