THE GREAT GATSBY:  Watch It At Home – Moulin Gatsby Just for fun, let’s try to think of a worse match of filmmaker and material than Baz Luhrmann and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY.  Judd Apatow’s Macbeth?  Woody Allen’s Lord of the Rings?  Michael Bay’s Remembrance of Things Past?  Jean-Luc Godard’s Shrek?  (Although […]

  For all its gigantic, game-changing success, THE WALKING DEAD seems fated always to be a dramatically uneven series.  Under new showrunner Scott M. Gimple (who, contrary to previous practice, will keep his job in the already-ordered Season 5), the first half of Season 4 got off to a strong start, with an emphasis on […]

  Over the course of its season, NBC’s SHADES OF BLUE muddled its way from being a broadcast network-lite version of a gritty cable cop drama to a more conventional heist thriller.  It was flawed in both contexts, but more able to carry its weight as the latter. The series, created by Adi Hasak, was […]

  Previously… on SAVE ME:  Beth Harper (Anne Heche), didn’t die when, after the latest of many drunken nights, she choked on a hero sandwich.  She was, in fact, saved by God Him/Herself, and is now a prophet of the Lord’s message, albeit on a small scale.  She knows local facts, like who her teenage […]

  There’s no cutesiness to be found in John Curran’s film TRACKS, a bracingly non-Disneyfied true-life nature tale.  In the mid-1970s, a young Australian woman named Robyn Davidson decided to walk across almost two thousand miles of desert to the Indian Ocean, accompanied for the most part by only a few camels and her faithful dog. […]

  MAN OF STEEL:  Watch It At Home – Another Guy In a Cape “Kneel before Zod!” the villain of that name roared in what’s probably the best-remembered piece of dialogue from Superman 2.  That line isn’t in the new MAN OF STEEL, but its filmmakers seem at times to have incorporated it into their attitude toward […]

  “Wildly uneven” was probably the best that could have been hoped from a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE hosted by non-actor, non-comic (but NBC synergy bait) Blake Shelton.  There were times when the need to come up with ideas for a star out of their comfort zone seemed to inspire the SNL writers, but also some […]

  NEBRASKA:  Buy A Ticket – A Lovely, Tart Slice of Americana An unusually strong season for American movies continues with the arrival of the simple and profound NEBRASKA, directed by Alexander Payne from a marvelous script by first-time feature writer Bob Nelson.  Among its other virtues, it manages to feature within its 114 minutes […]