As Alex in A Clockwork Orange would say, this is the real and like tragic part of the story beginning, O my brothers.  After Batman Returns undergrossed Batman by $90M in the US, Warners, you might say, freaked out.  Although everyone was careful to agree that Tim Burton and the studio had mutually parted […]

  HUMAN FACTORS:  Is Ronny Trocker’s Human Factors intended as a political allegory?  The married couple at its center are the German Jan (Mark Waschke) and the French Nina (Sabine Timoteo), and there’s a plot point about whether the ad agency they run will take on a political party as a client.  If that’s the […]

  FRANKLIN & BASH:  Wednesday 9PM on TNT Wednesdays have become series reclamation night on cable.  Last week we had Necessary Roughness adding John Stamos for a new series setting and a bit of zing; now FRANKLIN & BASH, reaching into the same bag of TV nostalgia, has brought Heather Locklear in as a regular.  […]

  TOP FIVE:  No Current US Distributor or Release Date (but that will change very soon) – Worth A Ticket Chris Rock is generally considered among the greatest stand-ups of his generation, and it’s been clear for some time that he wants to move up to the next cultural echelon, the level of regard where […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST was CBS’s most ambitious and elegantly constructed procedural, and its ratings in other circumstances would have been decent enough to keep it on the air beyond a 4 1/2-season run.  But the TV business changed around it, and marginal ratings can no longer sustain expensive series that don’t permit their networks […]

  ORPHAN BLACK is destined to be remembered more for the showcase it gave to the astonishing Tatiana Maslany than for its own narrative, although of course one couldn’t have existed without the other.  Series creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett deserve credit not just for their tricky concept of a biological thriller that featured […]

  GRACEPOINT:  Thursday 9PM on FOX Previously… on GRACEPOINT:  In the small seaside town of Gracepoint, in the western US (as opposed to the small seaside town of Broadchurch in the UK, where the BBC version of the same story took place), the body of 12-year old Danny Solano has been found on the beach […]

ONE BIG HAPPY:  Tuesday 9:30PM on NBC Previously… on ONE BIG HAPPY:  Luke (Nick Zano) and lesbian best buddy Lizzy (Elisha Cuthbert) have followed through on their vow to try and have a baby together if neither is with anyone else by age 30.  But the timing is off:  Lizzy finds out she’s pregnant just […]