47 RONIN:  Not Even For Free – Another Big-Budget Hollywood Folly, Gift-Wrapped For Christmas 47 RONIN blows into town on unusually fetid winds of bad buzz.  It began filming something like 2 1/2 years ago under the direction of first-timer Carl Rinsch, who hails from commercials (naturally), and then had to be significantly reshot, […]

  WINTER’S TALE:  Not Even For Free – 2 Hours of Thin Tinsel The new movie WINTER’S TALE makes one ponder the phrase “labor of love.”  It marks the feature directing debut of the enormously successful writer/producer Akiva Goldsman, whose films include A Time To Kill, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Hancock, The Da Vinci […]

  BAD WORDS:  Watch It At Home – Hilarious, For a While BAD WORDS eventually has to spell out its plot, and that’s when, like many an initially enthusiastic competitor, it fades, becoming increasingly soft and even sentimental.  For a while though, Jason Bateman’s directing debut, from a script by Andrew Dodge, is resolutely, and […]

  VEEP:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO VEEP, television’s most scintillatingly vicious comedy, returned with a relatively mild Season 3 premiere by its standards.  Largely that was because the script, written by Supervising Producers Sean Grey and Will Smith (from a story also by series creator Armando Iannucci) and directed by Chris Addison, kept Vice President […]

  PENNY DREADFUL:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime starting May 11 – Potential DVR Alert Showtime’s PENNY DREADFUL is an elegant addition to TV’s horror canon.  It’s been created and its initial 8-hour season has been entirely written by John Logan, whose A-list scripts include Gladiator, The Aviator, Sweeney Todd, Rango and Skyfall, and its pilot […]

  There was so much going on in tonight’s finale of the sensational fifth season of THE GOOD WIFE, it felt at times like a 2-hour episode that had been forced at gunpoint to strip down to a single hour.  There was barely enough time for Veronica (Stockard Channing), the irresponsibly direct mother of Alicia […]

  SUITS:  Wednesday 9PM on USA Because of the way USA scheduled last season’s episodes of SUITS, it feels as though Season 3 barely ended (it was just 2 months ago), and now Season 4 is already here.  The events of the Season 3 finale required a moderate reboot, as Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) […]

  NBC was so eager to get UNDATEABLE off its schedule that the network unceremoniously threw 4 episodes onto tonight’s line-up, 1 rerun and 3 new half-hours culminating in the season finale.  That treatment was a bit unfair, because although Adam Sztykiel’s series is easy to damn with faint praise, it managed the summer show […]