After 40 years of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, it’s fair to say that every season is uneven, and so is every episode.  Although it’s generally true that installments hosted by former cast members (this season it was Bill Hader) have the advantage of ready-made comfort zones for the writers and cast, and that hosts with […]

  DISOBEDIENCE (no distrib):  Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation (with Rebecca Landiewicz) of Naomi Alderman’s novel is one of the surprises of the festival.  It would be perfectly reasonable for the idea of Rachel McAdams as a Chassidic woman to bring back memories of Melanie Griffith in the camp classic A Stranger Among Us (and at least […]

> Worth a Ticket:  A funny, moving story about navigating the twists of life.   Mike Mills’ BEGINNERS is about the fumble for love, the wrong turns and mistakes that can delay–although luckily not always prevent–true happiness.  Mills has said that this story is semiautobiographical:  like his protagonist Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Mills learned after the […]

  Starz’s SURVIVOR’S REMORSE took some confident steps forward in its second season, even if that wasn’t reflected in the lackluster ratings.  Season 1 was mostly content with being a sports-driven Entourage clone (a position now occupied by HBO’s Ballers) about basketball star Cam Calloway (Jessie T. Usher) and his family basking in free agency […]

  CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (IFC):  no release date scheduled – Watch It At Home Olivier Assayas is a dazzlingly ambitious filmmaker, determined to do something totally different with each project he undertakes.  The results range from the spectacular (Carlos) to the tone-deaf (Demonlover), with his new CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA, which premiered at Cannes […]

  WHITE FAMOUS:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime – Change the Channel Showtime’s shaky new comedy WHITE FAMOUS is spectacularly ill-timed for the week after the downfall of Harvey Weinstein.  The premiere half-hour has as its comic centerpiece a sequence where a famous Hollywood figure meets with an aspiring young performer in his trailer, sitting so […]

  HER SMELL (no distrib – TBD):  Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) is a fan of invective, and the punk rocker Becky Something (Elizabeth Moss), when she’s in the full flower of her moderate success, lets it fly in a way that even Natalie Portman in Vox Lux would find […]

  ABBY’S:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC Unless the general public cares about a multi-camera sitcom being shot outdoors, NBC’s new ABBY’S may face a tough road.  Aside from that technological distinction (handled with seeming effortlessness by director Pamela Fryman), Abby’s feels like the kind of sitcom that might have tried to coast off the vibe […]