> Even diminished from the powerhouse it once was, GREY’S ANATOMY is the foundation of ABC’s drama schedule, and its return to the air after a nearly 2 month absence should lift the network’s Thursday considerably. WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  Things were grim when we last visited Seattle Grace.  Cristina (Sandra Oh) had, unknowingly, operated […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was pushed off the air for a solid month by the Winter Olympics, and then by 15 more minutes in the east tonight by an NHL game in primetime–not the kind of thing that pleases Generalissimo Lorne Michaels.  After all that, the show wasn’t remotely worth the wait. The Big Bang […]

  SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN:  Worth A Ticket –  Not a Disneyland Ride   Just to be clear, the new SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN bears about as much resemblance to this spring’s Mirror Mirror as The Dark Knight did to the 1960s Batman TV series.  Sure, there are some familiar aspects–an evil queen […]

  47 RONIN:  Not Even For Free – Another Big-Budget Hollywood Folly, Gift-Wrapped For Christmas 47 RONIN blows into town on unusually fetid winds of bad buzz.  It began filming something like 2 1/2 years ago under the direction of first-timer Carl Rinsch, who hails from commercials (naturally), and then had to be significantly reshot, […]

>Benh Zeitlin’s BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is the kind of movie that makes people wince when they hear “independent film”. A tale, with magical realist overtones, set in the mostly African-American poverty of the Louisiana bayous, it’s narrated by its precocious child protagonist, known as Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis). Hushpuppy lives with her father Wink […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

> Pawel Pawlikowski is a filmmaker whose name deserves to be better known: his films Last Resort and My Summer of Love are small but beautifully realized stories of intricate human emotion. His new picture The Woman In the Fifth, is in a somewhat different mode, edging toward genre, but it continues to display his […]

>Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full TV pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of […]