Season 1 of CW’s THE 100 worked better than logic suggested it should, considering that it was basically a thrift shop of plotlines and tropes from other, more ambitious fantasies, some aimed at teens (The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies), some not (Lost, Battlestar Galactica).  The post-apocalyptic survival stories moved briskly, sparked by […]

  ALMOST HUMAN:  Monday 8PM on FOX Previously… on ALMOST HUMAN:  2 years ago in 2046, Detective John Kennex (Karl Urban) was ambushed with his partner by “the Syndicate,” a mysterious organization that controls all local high-tech crime.  Kennex’s partner was killed, and his own leg was blown off and replaced with a synthetic one.  […]

  To say BATMAN BEGINS successfully rebooted the Warners franchise is accurate, but incomplete.  Christopher Nolan’s film, from the script he wrote with David S. Goyer, is a complete rethinking of the very concept of a comic book/superhero movie, one comparable to what The Godfather and Cabaret did with the gangster movie and the musical […]

  MARRIAGE STORY (Netflix – November 6 in theatres/December 6 streaming):  A film doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be great.  There may be no subjects more intensively depicted in movies and on television than marital break-ups and the miseries of divorce, yet Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is so fully realized and brilliantly performed that […]