AMERICAN HUSTLE:  Buy A Ticket – David O. Russell’s Epic Romp Is a Party That Goes On Till Dawn Even though it’s concerned with con men, low-lifes and deluded losers, AMERICAN HUSTLE is the happiest movie in town.  The co-writer/director David O. Russell seems intoxicated with life’s utter craziness and the joy of moviemaking; […]

  JUSTIFIED:  Tuesday 10PM on FX JUSTIFIED is pure dark pleasure to watch.  Other cable series are more thematically or structurally ambitious (which is why Justified is unfairly ignored at awards time), but Graham Yost’s series, taking its cue from the late Elmore Leonard’s original prose, is utterly assured in its command not just of plotting […]

  The writer-director Mike Cahill has staked out a unique piece of narrative territory for himself.  In both Another Earth and his new I ORIGINS, which debuted at Sundance last week (and won the festival prize for best science-based work), he explores the point where factual science meets not just science fiction, but something more metaphysical, an area […]

  STAR-CROSSED – Monday 8PM on CW Previously… on STAR-CROSSED:  10 years ago, a spaceship full of Atrians crash-landed outside Baton Rouge, and little earthling Emery met little Atrian Roman.  The pair bonded, but were forcibly separated (Emery thought Roman was killed), with the Atrians rounded up and sent to a ghetto-like area called the […]

  DA VINCI’S DEMONS:  Saturday 9PM on Starz In its second season, Starz’s DA VINCI’S DEMONS continues to be less fun than it seems like it should be.  The series concerns a “Leonardo Da Vinci” who’s about as historically accurate as “Matt LeBlanc” is on Episodes, an Indiana Jones-ish adventurer who’s hip-deep in mystical skullduggery […]

  You couldn’t tell it from the ratings, which were if anything more dismal than ever, or from tonight’s somewhat disappointing season finale, but the return of Founding Genius Dan Harmon rejuvenated COMMUNITY‘s fifth season.  It wasn’t that last year’s replacement team had done a shameful job–they worked hard to provide the same species of […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES returned for its third season tonight with a grim but unremarkable hour.  The episode, written by Co-Executive Producer Michael Alaimo and directed by David McWhirter, tipped off its hand very early for anyone raised on cop procedurals:  when the wife and mother of a missing family […]

  What is it with endings?  Why do they rattle the brains of even the greatest of television’s creative minds?  Half-endings, too, which is what tonight’s finish to the first half of MAD MEN‘s 7th and final season was, the remaining 7 hours to sit on an AMC shelf until a year from now.  (That […]