RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime It’s a bit surprising that RAY DONOVAN has been a steady performer for Showtime, considering that its tone tends toward the glum and monotonous, but next to Homeland, it’s one of the network’s more consistent titles.  Despite that success, Showtime deposed series creator/showrunner Ann Biderman at the end […]

  Like a middle schooler suddenly realizing that final exams are around the corner, the mostly tired 9th season of BONES went into overdrive tonight to deliver a super-dramatic season finale. The season had inherited a bummer of a cliffhanger from Season 8:  Booth (David Boreanaz) was blackmailed by petulant recurring serial killer Pelant (Christopher […]

  THE PERSIAN VERSION (Sony Classics):  Maryam Keshavarz’s dramedy won the Sundance Audience Award in the US Dramatic Competition, and it’s a smart mixture of broad comedy and family drama.  The comedy is mostly set in the present day, where aspiring filmmaker Leila (Layla Mohammadi), tries to keep her distance from her mother Shireen (Niousha […]

  EDGE OF TOMORROW:  Watch It At Home – Needed To Hit Reset One More Time There’s a lot of inventiveness in EDGE OF TOMORROW, which combines the premise of Groundhog Day with a War of the Worlds-like plot–certainly more than the usual for a mega-budgeted Hollywood summer action movie.  That keeps it compelling for […]

  THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Neon – TBD):  The Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, despite being a subject of critical raves over the years, hasn’t penetrated the space where arthouse favorites become known to the mainstream.  (It didn’t help that his English-language debut Louder Than Bombs was a bust.) The Worst Person In the World, […]

  There’s a reason CBS is as successful as it is.  PERSON OF INTEREST is just a procedural–albeit one with an unusually complicated premise–but it mixes solid plotting, well-paced action and just enough character backstory to give it a little substance, and the result is an hour of television that works.   Person starts with […]

  WIDOWS (20th – Nov. 16):  Widows is a genre movie that isn’t sure it wants to be one.  That’s not a shock, because the idea of the aesthete director Steve McQueen, of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years A Slave renown, toiling in the land of Ocean’s 8 seemed odd from the start.  And for […]

> After a full season, it’s still not clear just what HOUSE OF LIES is. The season finale, written and directed by series creator Matthew Carnahan, centered on what became the show’s main storyline in the latter part of its run:  the attempted takeover of the management consulting firm that employs Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) […]