> Reviews of some of the more prominent movies in theatres right now: X-MEN:  FIRST CLASS MIDNIGHT IN PARIS THE HANGOVER PART II KUNG FU PANDA 2 THE TREE OF LIFE

  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 […]

  THE SURVIVOR (no distrib):  So many films and television productions have tackled the subject of the Holocaust over the decades that it takes real effort to break through with a story that feels fresh.  Barry Levinson’s The Survivor is his strongest film in years, and it manages to have an impact.  The script by […]

  The headlines have all been in PERSON OF INTEREST‘s favor this past season.  As stories of massive worldwide surveillance by the NSA and other agencies have continued to surface, what not so long ago looked like a CBS entry into sci-fi has taken on the feel of just slightly exaggerated reality.  The series itself […]

  The original, Las Vegas-set CSI didn’t just spawn a mini-industry of its own spin-offs, but it can fairly lay claim to being one of the most influential shows of its generation, more or less inventing the subgenre of high-tech procedural that’s populated every network over the years since it began.  The series rose from […]

  RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime When a car crashes into a Los Angeles wall in the Season 4 premiere of Showtime’s sizable if somewhat inexplicable hit RAY DONOVAN, it doesn’t just crash into a wall:  it crashes directly into a giant mural of the Virgin Mary.  That’s the way Ray Donovan rolls, its […]

  NASHVILLE:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC NASHVILLE was last season’s biggest underachiever.  In the ratings, it hovered at a meager 1.6-1.8 despite beatable competition, and it would have been a bubble show if its songs (which are dynamite) hadn’t become hits on iTunes–and if ABC weren’t in such general disarray elsewhere.  Creatively, Callie Khouri’s series […]