JULIET, NAKED (no distrib):  Every Sundance has a title or two that isn’t particularly “indie,” other than by the fact that its stars aren’t hugely bankable.  These aren’t the films that set critical hearts aflutter, but they can be worthwhile all the same.  That’s the case with the likable Juliet, Naked, which continues Nick […]

  Although Starz was a co-financier of THE WHITE QUEEN, the show was produced by the BBC predominantly for a British audience, so it helped to have a working (or at least a Wikipedia) knowledge of 15th-century English history to get the most out of it.  For example, it would have been difficult to appreciate […]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full TV pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content […]

> THE CHANGE UP – Watch It At Home:  Cliches with Dirty Words Are Still Cliches There have been plenty of R-rated comedies this summer–a bumper crop, really–but none more fully committed to raunch than THE CHANGE-UP.  The script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (they wrote The Hangover, but also Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. BETRAYAL:  Sunday 10PM on ABC  – If Nothing Else Is On… BETRAYAL is certainly on brand for ABC.  Its pilot, just like the one for Revenge two seasons ago, starts by flash-forwarding to a shooting, and the action that follows takes us […]

  Every fan of HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER came into tonight’s Season 9 premiere knowing three things.  This will be not just the ninth, but the final season of the series; last season’s finale introduced us, at long last, to the still-unnamed Mother (new regular Cristin Milioti); and the entire season will take place […]

IZOMBIE:  Tuesday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright’s clever IZOMBIE (based on a DC comic) brings back from the dead something very close to the premise of ABC’s lamented Pushing Daisies.  In that fantastical show, the hero had the magical ability to bring corpses back from the dead, but […]

Stuart Blumberg’s first film as a director (his screenwriting credits include The Kids Are All Right), THANKS FOR SHARING, never quite manages to solve its own central problem:  how to make a sensitive and funny (and not harrowing) movie on the subject of sex addiction. We’ve had the harrowing version, of course, with Steve McQueen’s […]