THE FAULT IN OUR STARS:  Worth A Ticket – John Green’s Beloved Book Is Well Treated By the Screen It’s almost impossible to describe the plot of John Green’s YA novel THE FAULT IN OUR STARS without making it sounding precious and shamelessly sentimental.  Erich Segal’s Love Story, the giant hit and instant self-parody […]

  HOUSE OF LIES:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime HOUSE OF LIES deserves some credit for nailing the Wolf of Wall Street vibe before there was a Wolf of Wall Street.  Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) and his “pod” of business consultants have already spent 2 seasons merrily doing drugs, having inappropriate sex and swindling their own […]

  THE FAREWELL (A24):  Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is what could be called Sundance Classic, a small, very personal film nurtured by the festival into wide enough attention that A24 paid $6M to release it.  It’s based on Wang’s own life, so much so that it would be a spoiler to reveal the caption to […]

  Anne Hathaway has been one of the most versatile of recent SNL hosts, and in her third stint tonight, the show used her heavily, featuring her in everything but the cold open, Update and a brief pre-taped commercial parody.  The material, alas, wasn’t often up to her level, and in what’s been a heavily […]

> There’s an inescapable irony in Theresa Rebeck’s play SEMINAR when the bilious novelist (Alan Rickman) who’s reluctantly teaching a group of aspiring young writers launches an attack on one of them by predicting that his “whorishness” will make him more suited for a life in Hollywood than one in the finer precincts of the […]

  BROKEN CITY:  Watch It At Home – Wahlberg and Crowe In An Intriguing But Too Simplistic Thriller Studios love nothing better than predictability, so since Mark Wahlberg had a tidy January hit last year with Contraband, it was no surprise when Fox slotted his new thriller BROKEN CITY for the same weekend in 2013.  […]

  BORDERTOWN:  Sunday 9:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel BORDERTOWN adds a light dusting of politics to its Seth MacFarlane factory settings.  Produced by MacFarlane, and created by Family Guy writer/producer Mark Hentemann (the writing credit on the pilot is shared with “La Cucaracha” cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, but since Alcaraz is credited only as […]

> WARNING:  Spoilers Abound That expelled breath heard around the country this evening was a collective sigh of relief:  HOMELAND‘s season finale didn’t collapse.  On the contrary, it delivered a satisfying conclusion that resolved Season 1 storylines while setting the stage for an intriguing, and somewhat different, Season 2. No recent show has walked a […]