SCANDAL:  Thursday 9PM on ABC How tough is Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), newly minted as both Chief of Staff to President Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young), and head of secret intelligence and torture bureau B613?  As Season 7 of SCANDAL has it, Olivia is so tough that when she has Huck (Guillermo Diaz) train a […]

  DAMSEL (no distrib):  A hipster representation of comedy rather than anything comic itself.  Written and directed by David and Nathan Zellner, whose previous work includes the similarly film festival-targeted Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (they also appear in the film, David in a leading role), Damsel initially presents itself as the tall tale of Samuel […]

  THE PURGE:  Tuesday 10PM on USA THE PURGE movie franchise has made a fortune by working both sides of the ideological street.  On the one hand, it professes to condemn the near-future dystopia it depicts, in which an authoritarian government flushes the pipes of America by allowing 12 hours of nearly unrestricted violence without […]

  LEGACIES:  Thursday 9PM on CW CW’s LEGACIES brings the Vampire Diaries extended universe once again close to its roots, after the older-skewing adventures of The Originals.  We’re not only back in Mystic Falls, Virginia, but in a version of high school, although one that looks a lot like Hogwarts.  (The connection is so blatant […]

  Although the ratings continued heading downward, there were heartening developments in the back half of THE WALKING DEAD‘s Season 9.  Under new showrunner Angela Kang, the show took some steps to jar itself loose from the rut it gotten itself into.  The departure of star Andrew Lincoln may have kick-started the need to explore […]

  JOKER (Warners – October 4):  One’s perception of Todd Phillips’ JOKER may depend in part on the context in which one sees it.  In the 11 years since Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the MCU has taken over not just Hollywood’s financial heart but the very tone and definition of the comic-book genre.  The […]

  BELFAST (Focus/Universal – Nov. 12):  Kenneth Branagh’s semiautobiographical film walks a path laid by many great works by master filmmakers, including Fellini’s Amarcord, John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma.  Compared to those, Belfast is a relatively minor work, yet quite enjoyable on its own terms.  The setting is 1969, as “the […]

  FLORA AND SON (Apple):  John Carney’s Irish dramedy was (with Fair Play) the commercial bonanza of Sundance, reportedly with a $20M pricetag.  It isn’t hard to see why the studio and streamer checkbooks came out, since Flora and Son was one of the festival’s unabashed crowd pleasers.  Like most of Carney’s work (Once, Sing […]