Since the TV cop show has come of age–a process that began back in the days of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, but has accelerated greatly in recent years–there have been repeated attempts to push the limits of the genre, to tell more novelistic stories that are as much about character and setting […]

  Season 5 of WHITE COLLAR rebounded nicely from its more lachrymose previous season, which asked us to care far too much about the backstory issues of con man/forger/FBI consultant Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) and his sidekick Mozzie (Willie Garson).  This year, the show was back to doing what it does best, providing breezy capers […]

  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’ […]

  RED 2:  Watch It At Home – Less Fizz in the Drink This Time The first RED was a disarming surprise, a rom-com action adventure about retired but very lethal spies as bubbly as it was explosive.  It made almost $200M at the worldwide box office, and while that’s not quite Expendables money ($274M […]

  The Season 2 finale of Agents of SHIELD was the show trying its very, very hardest–and still not hitting the mark.  A great deal of work has gone into rescuing Agents since it plummeted from the heights of its enormous hype-driven premiere in Fall 2013, and it’s certainly a better series now than it […]

  TOY’S HOUSE is a delightful Sundance surprise, a fresh take on adolescent boys coming of age.  The conceit of Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ film, written by Chris Galletta, is that Joe Toy (Nick Robinson), his best friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso), and a very strange tagalong named Biaggio (Moises Arias) don’t just run away, they literally find an […]

At this point, with 3 first-rate films to his name, it’s time to stop remarking on how surprising it is that Ben Affleck is a major American filmmaker and just accept that he is one.  His latest, ARGO, is his best yet, one that has a broader palette of tones and a larger sense of scale […]

> THE CHANGE UP – Watch It At Home:  Cliches with Dirty Words Are Still Cliches There have been plenty of R-rated comedies this summer–a bumper crop, really–but none more fully committed to raunch than THE CHANGE-UP.  The script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (they wrote The Hangover, but also Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) […]