THE WOMAN IN BLACK:  Watch It At Home – Fun, But Creaky As Its Doors   THE WOMAN IN BLACK is so aggressively old-fashioned it sometimes feels like the horror movie version of The Artist.  A haunted house story in the grand style, it may be in color and wide-screen, but its heart […]

VEEP has no particular interest in going anyplace, so its season finale tonight was more or less the same as any other episode.  This has made for a fun, but somewhat repetitive, ride over the show’s initial 8-episode season.  Every week Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) fails to accomplish anything at all, usually drilling […]

  A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to […]

  We’re at the halfway point in Season 1 of THE NEWSROOM (so, yay!), and Aaron Sorkin celebrated by firing almost his entire writing staff.  (In a delightfully self-referential touch that TMI Magazine would appreciate, the only person he retained was his own ex-girlfriend.)  This would have more meaning if Sorkin hadn’t already taken sole […]

  THE EXPENDABLES 2:  Watch It At Home – Grumpy Old Mercenaries The first reel of THE EXPENDABLES 2 is just about all the numbskull fun you could ever wish for.  Our intrepid team of Barney (Sylvester Stallone), Christmas (Jason Statham), Yang (Jet Li), Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), and Toll Road (Randy […]

    THE IMPOSSIBLE – Worth A Ticket – A Tsunami Film With Both Spectacle and Emotion Director Juan Antonio Bayona has done a spectacular job of re-creating the 2004 Asian tsunami in THE IMPOSSIBLE. Staged mostly in studio tanks with added CG imagery, the 10-minute long sequence puts Clint Eastwood’s version of the disaster in Hereafter […]

  TREME:  Sunday 10PM on HBO   WHERE WE WERE:  New Orleans, of course, and hip-deep in the lives of a dozen struggling, striving, stubborn, idiosyncratic natives and recent arrivals.  These include the feckless trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), who reluctantly supports himself and his family as a high school music teacher; radio DJ/composer/rapper/dreamer Davis […]

  In its ninth season, GREY’S ANATOMY remains a model of smoothly operating network soap.  This week’s midseason finale, written by Consulting Producer Debora Cahn and directed by Rob Corn, had the bonus of being built around the upcoming wedding of Bailey (Chandra Wilson), and proved again that any episode featuring that character and actress […]