It would have been impossible for the Season 2 finale of THE GOOD PLACE to match the gut-punch of Season 1’s climactic twist, partly because until it happened, we hadn’t even known to look for one.  The Good Place was a broadcast network sitcom, albeit a whimsical one, and its creator Michael Schur, while […]

  THE HATE U GIVE (20th – October 19):  YA radicalization.  George Tillman Jr’s film, from a sprawling script by Audrey Wells (based on the novel by Angie Thomas) centers on Starr (Amandla Stenberg), an African-American teen who witnesses her friend shot to death by a white cop.  But the story also wants to encompass […]

  FOSSE/VERDON:  Tuesday 10PM on FX A pair of shadows loom over FX’s limited series FOSSE/VERDON.  One is the ultra-meta fact that its story has to some extent been told by Bob Fosse himself, in his barely fictionalized 1979 masterpiece All That Jazz, all about a chain-smoking, pill-popping, self-destructive womanizer who was also a brilliant […]

  LUCY IN THE SKY (Fox Searchlight/Disney – October 4):  Lucy In the Sky may be Noah Hawley’s first feature film, but he’s already establishing himself as quite the overdirector.  Hawley’s X-Men off-shoot series Legion had a repertoire of shifting aspect ratios, surreal imagery and dislocations in sound, space and time that felt exciting and […]

  B POSITIVE – Thursday 8:30PM on CBS These are tumultuous times.  (Hell, as this is being written, these are tumultuous hours.)  And that’s true in the world of broadcast television as well, which was already being hammered by new technology and viewing habits even before the pandemic hit.  And yet the model of the […]

  THE GOOD HOUSE (DreamWorks – TBD):  By my count, it’s been two full decades since Sigourney Weaver was at the center of a feature film (that was Heartbreakers, where she shared the spotlight with Jennifer Love Hewitt), and that says an unfortunate amount about the American movie industry.  So even though Maya Forbes and […]

  EILEEN:  A dark tale of liberation, based on the novel by Ottessa Moshlegh (and adapted by Moshlegh with Luke Goebel).  Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) is an anonymous employee at a boys’ prison in a confining, wintry Massachusetts town during the early 1960s.  Her job is depressing, and her home life is worse, stuck alone in […]

ANORA (Neon – Oct. 17):  Sean Baker has been making quirky, captivating character studies for some time now, starting with Starlet in 2012 and following it with Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket.  The rollicking Anora, which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes and will be aggressively pushed by Neon for awards, seems like it may be his […]