THE CLOSER:  Monday 9PM on TNT   WHERE WE WERE:  The LAPD, where Atlanta emigre Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick), having triumphed over the initial prejudices of her all-male squad, has forged a well-earned reputation as the person a guilty suspect would least want to face in an interrogation room. WHERE WE […]

    BOSS:  Friday 10PM on Starz WHERE WE WERE:  In a state of depression.  By the end of last season, Chicago Mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer) had systematically murdered, driven away, destroyed and/or humiliated anyone who even looked like they might get in his way.  Among the victims:   (now-deceased) closest aide Ezra Stone […]

‎ Jacques Audiard doesn’t do sentimental. His last film, A Prophet, had the clear-eyed view of crime and the dramatic heft of a French version of “The Wire,” and his new and very different drama RUST & BONE benefits as well from his refusal to take the road of easy emotion. Lord knows, the bare […]

  A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to […]

  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 […]

  RISE OF THE GUARDIANS:  Worth a Ticket – “The Avengers” as Holiday Fantasy RISE OF THE GUARDIANS doesn’t entirely look or feel like what we’ve come to expect from DreamWorks Animation.  Under Peter Ramsey’s direction (his first feature), the images have a burnished, almost pewter-tinted glow, a glint of long-forgotten memory, very different from […]

  What kind of show, in the end, is HOMELAND?  Focus groups are often asked simply to describe whatever it is they’ve just seen, and Homeland has tried to be a romance, a thriller, an action adventure, a story about politics and terrorism, a psychological drama, and more–all at once.  That it’s succeeded much of […]

  SUITS:  Thursday 10PM on USA Last season, SUITS took a leap up in class, becoming not just the smartest and most sophisticated show on USA–which, let’s face it, isn’t the highest bar in the business–but making itself worthy of comparison with some of the best shows on anyone’s air, including legal genre colleague The […]