LONDON ROAD may have seemed marginally less odd as the stage musical it originally was.  No matter how naturalistic a play may be, the mechanics of theatre make it somewhat stylized, and that may have brought the show’s conceits to life when it was staged by England’s National Theatre company.  But as a film […]

  Natalie Portman certainly hasn’t made it easy for herself with her debut as a writer/director, A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS.  The film, which premiered at Cannes (but tellingly, doesn’t yet have a US distributor) before its first North American screening at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, is a period piece shot almost entirely […]

  YOU’RE THE WORST:  Wednesday 10:30PM on FXX The secret shame of Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash), the protagonists of YOU’RE THE WORST, is that they’re far more conventional than they’re desperately trying to appear (to themselves, let alone anyone else), and that’s proven to be a rich source of comedy for Stephen […]

  The world of television may have undergone a revolution over the past decade, but it hasn’t hit the continent of late-night network talk shows, which have introduced variations from their 1950s-era formats, but little meaningful change.  There is, every time, the (middle-aged white) guy who does a topical monologue, the desk (or pre-taped) piece, […]

  Despite an underwhelming season finale that favored sentiment over action until the closing seconds, THE LAST SHIP had a fairly smooth second voyage.  (The show, one of TNT’s highest-rated originals, has already been renewed for Season 3.)  Season 1 had ended, somewhat surprisingly, with the discovery of a cure for the virus that had […]

  MISTRESSES faced some challenges in its 3rd season.  Two were interrelated:  for budget reasons, the network and studio decided to relocate the production to Vancouver, and that prompted marquee star Alyssa Milano to disengage from her contract.  Season 3 didn’t really suffer from these changes, since Milano’s character Savi had a relatively weak role […]

  Great TV dramas tend to arrive on our screens fully-formed.  (The same isn’t true of comedies, which sometimes take an entire season to find their voices.)  By the end of the first hours of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The West Wing, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Shield, Lost–it was clear that we were […]

  TYRANT went all the way back to the source for its main plotline this season, giving Bassam Al-Fayeed (Adam Rayner) a saga so Moses-like that he might as well have witnessed a burning bush along the way.  Bassam was sentenced to death for treason by his brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom), ruler of a Middle […]