IRON MAN 3:  Watch It At Home – Offbeat But Uneven Tentpole The last thing on earth that Shane Black, the co-writer (with Drew Pearce) and director of IRON MAN THREE (the way the credits spell it) seems to have wanted to make was an Iron Man movie, and that makes this third–or third […]

  For scripted network shows, a summer season is like a dog year, far more weighty than the regular kind.  The mortality rate is so high that just getting a renewal is a considerable feat, and a show like Rookie Blue, extended to a 5th season, might as well be Meet the Press.  So THE […]

  ICE AGE:  CONTINENTAL DRIFT – Watch It At Home – The CSI of Family Franchises Does Its Thing   You know what the fabulous Peter Dinklage never gets to do on Game of Thrones?  Sing!  That’s remedied in the new 3D animated ICE AGE:  CONTINENTAL DRIFT, where as the voice of monkey pirate Captain […]

> Worth a Ticket:  Diesel and The Rock keep their pedals to the metal. If you want to feel truly American, try reflecting on the new FAST FIVE while wall-to-wall coverage of the British royal wedding is airing on the television before you.  Every culture gets the pop entertainment it craves, and the dumb, disreputable […]

  Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

  Graham Yost has done an exceptionally smart job of expanding upon Elmore Leonard’s original fiction and showrunning FX’s JUSTIFIED over the past five years, and he knows, as the song says, when to fold em.  There was little doubt that Justified lost some of the spring in its step in this 5th season, and […]

  In its second season, Stephen Bochco and Eric Lodal’s MURDER IN THE FIRST altered its format, only to find new ways to fail.  Season 1 had told a single convoluted story, a murder mystery loaded with so many red herrings and reversals that by the time it ended, it was impossible to care who […]

  INTELLIGENCE:  Preview Tonight at 9PM, then Monday 10PM on CBS starting January 13 – If Nothing Else Is On… Gabriel Black (Josh Holloway), the hero of CBS’s midseason entry INTELLIGENCE, follows in the TV footsteps of Chuck and the autistic character from Alphas by having a brain directly wired into all electronic signals in […]