In the fall of its fifth season, THE WALKING DEAD has remained a ratings phenomenon like nothing else on television, and for much of this run of episodes, the always-uneven show deserved some of its wild success.  Showrunner Scott M. Gimple and overall Walking Dead honcho Robert Kirkman made unexpected pacing choices that kept […]

  EUREKA, while never a breakout hit, was a sturdy performer for 5 years on Syfy–and one of the increasingly small number of shows on its air that was actually science-fiction, as opposed to superhero fantasy, horror, reality, paranormal thriller, or whatever else the network is trying to use to broaden its brand (while actually […]

  Every year when I arrive at Sundance, I swear to myself that I’ll review each film there as soon as I’ve seen it, but after making the effort to keep up for the first day or two, a daily screening schedule that starts at 8:30AM each morning (earlier if you need to be on a Wait List line, and that […]

> Worth a Ticket; It Wasn’t Broke, They Didn’t Fix It In Hollywood, the word “sequel” is often code for “remake.”  This isn’t news:  the James Bond series has been going on for almost 50 years, and allowing for the occasional change in cast and some fluctuation in quality, it’s pretty much been the same […]

  CHRONICLE – Worth A Ticket –  “Found Footage” That Deserves to Be Found   Over the past decade, audience hunger for “reality”–the word very much in quotation marks–has engulfed much of popular cultture, from YouTube videos to self-produced songs, from tweets to television series and even cable networks built around people playing manipulated versions […]

  PROMISED LAND:  Watch It At Home – Promise, But No Fulfillment There’s an original idea located somewhere near (but not at) the heart of PROMISED LAND:  start with what would normally be an obvious storyline about a good environmentalist (Dustin Noble, played by John Krasinski) vs. a heartless corporate tool (Steve Butler, in the […]

  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 […]

  FINDING CARTER:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV FINDING CARTER was one of last year’s genuine surprises.  Showing up on MTV, of all places, it rose past its contrived premise–teen Carter (Kathryn Prescott) finds out that Lori (Milena Govich), the mother she’s grown up with, is actually the woman who kidnapped her as a child, and […]