> It takes about an hour, but Nicholas McCarthy’s THE PACT, which premiered in the Park City At Midnight section at Sundance, eventually turns out to have a neat twist up its sleeve, one that switches the movie from haunted house horror to an entirely different subgenre of thriller.  And after that, a solid reel […]

>  See A Word About Busted Pilots Peter Tolan, who with Denis Leary created Rescue Me, knows something about the comedy that emerges when when men try to assert their masculinity in the most idiotic ways.  So you can understand why FOX developed COUNCIL OF DADS, which was meant to bring that kind of tone […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots For those who like Six Degrees of Separation-ish linkages:  the protagonist of ABC’s busted pilot GRACE is Michael Grace, an aging, womanizing choreographer who bears some resemblance to Bob Fosse–or at least to Joe Gideon, the center of Fosse’s semiautographical All That Jazz.  The actor playing Grace is […]

  Among other things, the midseason finale of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES gets credit for the season’s most subversive use of Christmas carols, playing cheerily under ancient vampire Klaus (Joseph Morgan) as he first slaughtered a dozen vampire-werewolf hybrids, and then cold-bloodedly drowned Mayor Lockwood (Susan Walters) as a blow against her son Tyler (Michael Trevino), […]

> ACT OF VALOR:  Watch It At Home –  Fast Forward When They’re Not Shooting If there were a genuine national military crisis, and a small group of expert soldiers were needed to protect the interests of the country, would you want George Clooney or Brad Pitt behind the triggers of those guns?  Not really.  […]

  TYRANT wasn’t the summer’s worst show, but it’s been the most piercing disappointment of the mini-season,  wasting a potentially thrilling premise–behind the scenes at a Middle Eastern military dictatorship–that seemed perfectly suited to FX, one that could combine the network’s trademark narrative energy and ambition with prestige (series co-developer Howard Gordon is also a […]

  TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE:  Worth A Ticket – Another Late Autumn Role for Clint Think of TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE as Million Dollar Baby Lite.  Again we have the cranky older man (Clint Eastwood, this time a baseball scout instead of a boxing trainer) dealing with a feisty, stubborn young woman (Amy Adams as […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS The broadcast networks don’t get much in the way of pleasant surprises these days, but last summer’s UNDER THE DOME was an exception.  CBS’s “event” adaptation of Stephen King’s massively long novel was intended as an ambitious entry in the quiet world of summer programming, and it […]