NOW YOU SEE ME:  Watch It At Home – Don’t Look Too Closely A summer action movie, like a magic act, is only as good as its final trick, and the one in the relatively low-budget NOW YOU SEE ME (which this season means something under $100M) is fairly entertaining–not impossible to foresee, if […]

  IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (Annapurna – November 30):  Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight received a rapturous standing ovation at its Toronto premiere, and it’s unquestionably a beautiful piece of filmmaking,  Jenkins reunited with most of his Moonlight creative team, including cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Britell, and with a higher budget at […]

  CHARMED:  Sunday 9PM on CW CW’s reboot of CHARMED wants to be a lighthearted supernatural romp, but it also seeks to push as many topical buttons as it possibly can.  So while the basic story of a trio of young women witches provides a built-in tale of female empowerment, the new pilot also comes […]

  If NBC’s Thursday night sitcoms were a movie about college roommates, The Office would be the one who doesn’t study or do the work but still gets better grades than anyone else, 30 Rock would be the teacher’s pet, Community the stoner who’s either going to end up as a temp or a billionaire.  […]

  The ratings for ABC’s AGENTS OF SHIELD have never been worse, and the show has been demoted for next season, reduced to serving as the Agent Carter for Marvel’s new Inhumans series and filling in during its post-fall hiatus.  The truth, though, is that these past two seasons were creatively probably the best SHIELD […]

  TABOO:  Tuesday 10PM on FX – Potential DVR Alert It may be that Tom Hardy will join Clive Owen and Michael Fassbinder among British leading men who never quite became the global superstars they seemed meant to be.  With Owen and Fassbinder, there’s a certainly coldness to them that makes them perfectly cast in […]

  The cul de sac has moved south along the dial, but aside from that, there’s nothing very different about the TBS version of COUGAR TOWN, transported last night pretty much intact from its prior home on ABC.  (It’s possible that later episodes could show more of a shift, since although series co-creator and original […]

  As we noted yesterday in writing about The Good Wife, churning out 22 hours per season is a tough challenge for any serialized network drama, especially one that concentrates on one central story, unlike, say the multiple plots of a show like Nashville.  The Originals would have fared better with a cable-sized 10 or […]