MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM:  Watch It At Home – More Like a Trudge The movies haven’t figured out what to do with Idris Elba.  The powerful, fiery actor has been spectacular on TV, first on The Wire and more recently on Luther, and he’s kicked around as a supporting player in some big-budget […]

  THE ORIGINALS and its creator/showrunner Julie Plec have been fearless about plunging viewers of the New Orleans-set supernatural soap into a veritable bayou of mythology.  We’re half a season in, and already swamped by vampires, werewolves, vampire/werewolf hybrids, an impossible unborn hybrid baby, a teen super-witch, an assortment of garden-variety witches, and the occasional […]

  There was one last super-powerful conspiracy for NIKITA (Maggie Q) to bring down in tonight’s series finale, and a climactic showdown with arch-villainess Amanda (Melinda Clarke) to survive, as CW’s low-rated yet hard-to-kill action series finally came to an end after a truncated 4th mini-season. The final episode (fittingly entitled “Canceled”), written by Executive […]

  The consensus is that the 2014 Sundance Film Festival was a solid but unexciting one.  To an extent that’s a business judgment: whatever its leaders may say publicly, Sundance gave itself up long ago to being as much an acquisition showcase as an artistic one, and this year, while quite a few films at […]

  THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE AMERICANS thrives on complications–moral, political, ethical and sexual–and it starts Season 2 with a nifty one.  In the Reagan era, when the show is set, the fundamentalist Afghan mujahideen that deep-cover KGB agent Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) betrays and kills were mortal enemies of the Soviets backed […]

  THE FOSTERS seemed sturdier in the first half of its season than in its second.  Series creators Brad Bredeweg and Peter Paige loaded up so strenuously on sudsy, often ham-handed melodrama that it’s threatened to extinguish the fine little character moments that originally distinguished the series.  Tonight’s season finale had more of the same–and […]

  There was a scene in tonight’s Season 3 finale of SCANDAL where Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) sat together after a shocking death and, in a manner that was remarkably low-key for this series, talked about the fact that they’d become such monsters that when the death occurred, their minds […]

  No one could seriously imagine that the TV remake of ROSEMARY’S BABY would come close to Roman Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece, so let’s get the obvious over with in a single paragraph.  (The amazing thing, really, is that it’s lasted this long without an inferior reboot being made, although there was an awful 1976 made-for-TV […]