R.I.P.D.:  Not Even For Free – No Life After Death For This One Ryan Reynolds plays a dead man in the new R.I.P.D., and thus it makes sense that his character would be frustrated and depressed for much of its length, but watching him, you almost feel like his glumness is a message to […]

  RED 2:  Watch It At Home – Less Fizz in the Drink This Time The first RED was a disarming surprise, a rom-com action adventure about retired but very lethal spies as bubbly as it was explosive.  It made almost $200M at the worldwide box office, and while that’s not quite Expendables money ($274M […]

  TURBO:  Watch It At Home – Nothing Supercharged About the Script If the new DreamWorks Animation release TURBO proves anything, it’s that even for the competition, there’s a special mystique about the films of Pixar.  (Until recently, anyway.)  Turbo painstakingly combines Ratatouille with the original Cars like the killer on The Bridge attaching American […]

  CAMP:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC Previously… on CAMP:  Camp Little Otter in upstate New York is an old-fashioned place where the kids learn crafts, the counselors try to get laid and the owner, Mack Greenfield (Rachel Griffiths), is trying to hold on while enduring a divorce from her dickish husband Steve (Jonathan LaPaglia), who […]

  THE BRIDGE:  Wednesday 10PM on FX Previously… on THE BRIDGE:  In the exact center of the bridge connecting El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, a killer has placed two half-bodies of murdered women, carefully joined together.  One is an anti-immigrant conservative American judge; the other is a teenage Mexican prostitute.  The crimes require a […]

  SUITS:  Tuesday 10PM on USA SUITS is the class of the USA Network portfolio, as well as one of its biggest hits, although there are times when it can seem like an orgy of brinksmanship for its own sake.  Character after character faces down an adversary (whether professional or personal) and vows to defeat […]

  COVERT AFFAIRS:  Tuesday 9PM on USA Last season was an important one for COVERT AFFAIRS, as it transitioned from being a light spy caper about appealing newbie CIA agent Annie Walker (Piper Perabo) to presenting Annie as a serious, more experienced operative.  While no one would confuse it with a LeCarre thriller, the show […]

  THE NEWSROOM:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Aaron Sorkin may have professed not to agree with most of the criticisms aimed at THE NEWSROOM during its initial season, but a look at its Season 2 premiere makes it pretty clear that he was listening.  From the new and altogether less stentorian opening credit sequence (no […]