SIDNEY HALL (no distrib):  Shawn Christensen’s literary drama (written with Jason Dolan) is initially engaging as a modern-day sort of J.D. Salinger story, told simultaneously across three time periods, with Sidney Hall (Logan Lerman throughout) presented as an arrogant but troubled teen, an acclaimed novelist, and a middle-aged man who’s run away from the […]

  REBEL IN THE RYE (no distrib):  Danny Strong’s first film as a director is a biography of J. D. Salinger (Nicholas Hoult), and it hits all the Salinger bullet points:  his early struggles to get published, his spectacularly doomed romance with legendary playwright’s daughter Oona O’Neill (he lost her to Charlie Chaplin), his difficult […]

  THE LAST WORD (Bleecker Street):  Shirley MacLaine does the irascible codger thing.  She’s smart enough not to overplay the very familiar hand she’s been dealt by screenwriter Stuart Ross Fink and director Mark Pellington, but still there’s little here we haven’t seen many times before.  Harriet Lauler (MacLaine), while a holy terror to everyone […]

  To be sure, NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE hasn’t had much competition in the category of Most Imaginative Broadcast Sitcom this season.  (Really, there’s just The Last Man On Earth, which has been having a monotonous and somewhat off-putting Season 2.)  Still, while the half-hour form (you can’t really call many of the shows “comedies” […]

  Aided by a compatible WWE Smackdown lead-in and a red state-friendly storyline, SHOOTER has been a sturdy performer for USA, already renewed for a second summer season.  The series is low-ambition compared to USA’s Mr Robot or even Suits or Colony (or the awful Falling Water, for that matter), but series creator John Hlavin […]

  THE YOUNG POPE:  Sunday/Monday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert The cinema-tization of television continues with HBO’s THE YOUNG POPE.  It’s been created and directed by the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who made 2013’s Best Foreign Film Oscar winner The Great Beauty and followed it with the gorgeous but not quite coherent Truth.  Sorrentino is […]

  VICTORIA:  Sunday 9PM on PBS – In the Queue Female British monarchs are certainly having a television moment, with Elizabeth I a regular character on CW’s soon-to-return Reign, her current namesake at the center of Netflix’s The Crown, and now the PBS/ITV VICTORIA.  The newest arrival is far classier than CW’s YA soap, but […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime We’ve recently acquired the concept of “legacy media,” referring to things like newspapers that are actually printed on pieces of paper–still potentially useful, but decidedly out of date.  Showtime’s HOMELAND is sort of “legacy quality TV”.  It kicked off in 2011 with one and a half classic seasons, a nimble, […]