STAR TREK:  DISCOVERY – Episodes available each Sunday at CBS All Access – In the Quene There are quite a few perils to reaching a judgment about the new STAR TREK: DISCOVERY based on its opening hour, the only episode that will air on the CBS broadcast network before the series begins streaming (1 […]

  GOTHAM:  Thursday 8PM on FOX Coming off its most satisfying season to date, the first where it seemed to have some control over its sprawl, GOTHAM has been given a new timeslot on Thursdays for its 4th season, and the subtitle “A Dark Knight.”  It is indeed creeping ever closer to the territory of […]

  THE GOOD PLACE:  Thursday 8:30PM on NBC starting 9/28 The Season 1 finale of NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE was a tough act to follow.  Michael Schur’s series pulled off the plot twist of the season, which turned out on further examination to have been hiding in plain sight all along.  We learned (2016-17 spoiler […]

  USA’s THE SINNER was a genuine if moderate sleeper of this summer’s TV season, not a breakout hit but consistently rating ahead of its lead-in, the veteran Suits, and it’s not entirely clear why.  The show marked the return to TV of Jessica Biel, playing the seemingly ordinary Cora Tannetti, who committed a violent […]

  DARKEST HOUR (Focus/Universal – Nov. 22):  A shameless piece of rabble-rousing Hollywood biography, directed by Joe Wright and written by Anthony McCarten, and served hot on a platter to Oscar voters.  The subject is Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman), and the terrain is the first few weeks of his tenure as Prime Minister, doubted by […]

  PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Annapurna – Oct. 13):  In the hothouse of a film festival, movies that are unrelated inevitably begin to collide with each other in the viewer’s mind.  So it’s difficult, in a festival that’s given us the extraordinary Disobedience, to give similar weight to Angela Robinson’s much frothier and thinner […]

  BREATHE (Bleecker Street – Oct 13):  BREATHE wasn’t the favored Triumph of the Human Spirit drama at Toronto this year; that title went to Stronger, with Jake Gyllanhaal as a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.  Not having seen Stronger, I can’t compare the two, but Breathe has plenty in it to please audiences […]

  DOWNSIZING (Paramount – Dec 22):  Alexander Payne’s latest film (written with his usual partner Jim Taylor) is a delight–and a bit of a mess.  On its face, Downsizing is a leap out of Payne and Taylor’s comfort zones, renowned as they are for small-scale character studies and social satires like Election, The Descendants, Sideways […]