Worth a ticket.   In movies, as in life, when someone is offered an illicit miracle drug that seems too good to be true, it usually is. So the general narrative arc of LIMITLESS doesn’t come as a huge surprise. What is surprising is that Neil Burger’s film, predicted to be the highest […]

  The existence of the strikingly similar (in premise) Stitchers provides some perspective on the imagination and skill that’s gone into IZOMBIE.  Both shows involve young women who temporarily enter the minds of the recently dead to solve their murders, but iZombie is put together with consistent wit, intelligence and a strong sense of character. […]

  BONES brought out the big guns for its Season 8 finale–a long-awaited marriage proposal from Brennan (Emily Deschanel) to Booth (David Boreanaz), and the return of the show’s arch-villain, Christopher Pelant (Andrew Leeds).  Pelant is both a genius-level computer hacker and a serial killer who, the last time we saw him, had stolen Hodgins’ […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  You would have thought that if there was one SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE host who’d escape the cliche of a musical monologue, it would be Christoph Waltz, but you’d be wrong.  “Smile, Damn It, Smile” wasn’t even a funny song, an Austria gag without any teeth or edge.  (Although Taran Killian’s Casual Hitler was a […]

  THE GOOD WIFE:  Sunday 9PM on CBS WHERE WE WERE: Waiting for Kalinda’s door to open.  She (Archie Panjabi) was calmly waiting inside with a gun, waiting for her former husband, a man who even Kalinda thinks is dangerous.  It was the end of a long, somewhat meandering season highlighted, so to speak, by […]

    CHICAGO FIRE:  WEDNESDAY 10PM on NBC WHAT IT’S SAYING:  Backdraft, not Rescue Me.  Big fires, sweeping, heroic music, a stalwart band of brothers (and the occasional sister) uniting despite their personal strife to save the people of Chicago. WHAT IT’S REALLY SAYING:  Even though it’s from Dick Wolf, not a pure Law & […]

  DESTROYER (Annapurna – Dec. 25):  Another fractured-time thriller, this one trickier than most, because the script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi features a sort of time-loop within a loop.  All that structural fanciness aside, Destroyer is mostly a vehicle for Nicole Kidman’s aggressively deglamorized performance as an end-of-the-line LAPD detective named Erin Bell.  […]