LA LA LAND (Summit/Lionsgate – December 2):  No film arrived at Toronto this year with more hype to live up to than Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the follow-up to the filmmakers’s Oscar-winning Whiplash and the recipient of white-hot raves in Venice (where Emma Stone won the Best Actress award) and Telluride.  Chazelle’s rapturous […]

  THE VIKINGS:  Sunday 10PM on History Channel Previously… on VIKINGS:  Back around the 8th Century AD, Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) is the one Viking visionary enough to believe that there are lands to the west even more ripe for conquest (like, for example, England) than those in the east, and he embraces the revolutionary […]

  TRUTH BE TOLD:  Friday 8:30PM on NBC – Change the Channel Out of the pit that is the current state of NBC comedy crawls TRUTH BE TOLD, which was seemingly designed to make its lead-in, the mediocre Undateable, look like a television classic.  Its creator is DJ Nash, who last gave us the semiautobiographical […]

>  See A Word About Busted Pilots Peter Tolan, who with Denis Leary created Rescue Me, knows something about the comedy that emerges when when men try to assert their masculinity in the most idiotic ways.  So you can understand why FOX developed COUNCIL OF DADS, which was meant to bring that kind of tone […]

> ALCATRAZ was a show–pardon the use of past tense:  the series still has a pulse, but recent ratings make it an increasing longshot for a repeat sentence–that just never found its groove.  Convoluted but obvious, original and yet impersonal, the show was rarely terrible and never essential. The series was, as they say, “troubled.”  […]

  WICKED LITTLE LETTERS (no distrib):  In The Lost Daughter, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley played the same character at different ages, which prevented them from sharing the screen.  That’s remedied in the fairly irresistible Wicked Little Letters, an English small-town comedy in the classic (if exceptionally foul-mouthed) mode.  Inspired by a true incident, it tells the […]

  HIT MAN (no distrib):  A clever, funny, sexy entertainment from Richard Linklater and emerging star Glen Powell, who co-wrote the script with the director (both also produced), inspired by an already-wild true story.  Powell plays Gary Johnson, a philosophy teacher moonlighting as a consultant for a local Texas police department.  He’s supposed to be […]

  Of all the films in this year’s US Dramatic Competition at Sundance, Kat Candler’s HELLION was the one that most closely matched what’s become a festival template: Aggressively shaky handheld camerawork:  Check. Small-town dysfunctional family (alcoholic/grief-stricken division):  Check. Third act sparked by violence:  Check. Rebellious yet sensitive and misunderstood young protagonist:  Check. Commercially successful […]