GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO With tonight’s Season 7 premiere, the endgame of HBO’s GAME OF THRONES has begun, kicking off the final 13 episodes (which will be divided 7/6 over 2 seasons).  It might be called the “Don’t Screw This Up” run, as series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, now […]

  MIND GAMES:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC Previously… on MIND GAMES:  Bipolar genius Clark Edwards (Steve Zahn), an expert in the study of the brain and how it responds to stimuli, was recently fired from his post as a Psychology professor after his obsessive romance with student Beth (Katherine Cunningham).  He’s partnered with his recently […]

  THE SHROUDS (no distrib):  At age 81, David Cronenberg’s fascination with the malignant possibilities of the human body, and with the fiendish manipulation of same, still knows no bounds.  The Shrouds begins with the premise of a cemetery in which the bodies of the decomposing dead are wrapped in electronic swaddling that enables mourners to watch […]

> Worth a ticket. The director and writer of Saw, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, combine again to bring us–hey, where are you going?  No, seriously:  don’t run away.  Leaving aside that Saw is rather unfairly maligned (before it became the poster child for “torture porn” and a dumb sequel machine for Lionsgate, the original […]

  LEGIT:  Thursday 10:30PM on FX Not everyone can be Louis C.K.  That’s the lesson of LEGIT, FX’s latest excursion to its comedy sweet spot of the low-budget, stand-up grunge aesthetic that’s given us It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, The League and Wilfred as well as Louie.  This time, though, the reigning sensibility–in the pilot, […]

  DATES:  Thursday 9PM on CW – If Nothing Else Is On… CW is barely promoting its run of the 2013 British series DATES, which the network is using (presumably for a negligible fee) to fill a few hours of its summer schedule.  It’s an oddity, the kind of show you might expect to find […]

  FRANKENWEENIE:  Watch It At Home – Tim Burton Tries To Bring His Old Creation Back to Life Tim Burton certainly can’t have planned it this way, but his new stop-motion feature version of FRANKENWEENIE serves, in a sense, as a microcosm of his career:  starting as a modestly appealing and very personal meld of […]

  It remains a pop culture puzzle that Marvel can have such uninterrupted, unprecedented success as a producer of blockbuster movies, yet still not have cracked the code of TV, while DC, which is hurrying (perhaps too fast) to play catch-up on the big screen, is routinely turning out hit series for the small one.  (Well, […]