THE FOSTERS had a very busy first season (or half-season, depending on whether you count ABCFamily’s practice of ordering 10 summer episodes and then 10 more for winter as one season or two). There was, to begin with, the basic situation of the Foster family itself, with two lesbian parents, Lena (Sherri Saum) and Stef […]

  FALLING SKIES told a somewhat different story this season under showrunner Remi Aubuchon than it had in its first two years, and the changes worked fairly well for the most part.  Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and his plucky band of rebels against the evil alien Espheni, instead of roaming the east coast, were based […]

  After three seasons, THE KILLING is still hard to get a fix on.  Technically it’s a murder mystery, but efficiently and intelligently spinning out crime stories is what it’s least good at–its narrative is notoriously overextended, sloppily plotted and reliant on bad detective work and a seemingly infinite number of red herrings.  (Even though […]

  2 GUNS:  Watch It At Home – Mindless Movie Action, The Old-Fashioned Way In this endless CG demo reel of a summer, the old-time, human-scaled mayhem of 2 GUNS is downright charming.  The idea of an action movie substituting a pair of charismatic stars and some analog shootouts for cities being pulverized in Imax […]

  UNFORGETTABLE:  Sunday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… You may already have forgotten UNFORGETTABLE.  It debuted in fall 2011 as one of CBS’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of procedurals, its particular gimmick being that heroine Detective Carrie Wells (Poppy Montgomery) has hyperthymesia, the ability to recall with absolute precision almost everything she’s […]

  THE WOLVERINE:  Watch It At Home – The Clawed Superhero’s Latest is Distinctive But Unthrilling THE WOLVERINE, wanting to be both more and less than a typical superhero spectacle, demonstrates the perils of messing with the formula.  James Mangold’s film, with a script credited to Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, has the worthy aim […]

  BLUE JASMINE:  Worth A Ticket – Cate Blanchett Is Dazzling in Woody Allen’s Latest Woody Allen has made so many movies at such regular intervals, and they’re so thematically linked, that it’s tempting to view his work as one gigantic serial, a by-now 60-hours-plus epic of disappointments in life and love, artistic fantasy, moral […]

  Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]