Sundance 2023 Reviews: “Past Lives,” “Fairyland” & “Infinity Pool”
PAST LIVES (A24): The playwright Celine Song makes an impressive feature writing/directing debut with the lovely, eloquent Past Lives. The film is sort of the opposite of Sliding Doors and all of the multiversal ente...
Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Wild Robot” & “Disclaimer”
THE WILD ROBOT (DreamWorks Animation/Universal – Sept. 27): Chris Sanders’s movie is a fairly captivating if unsurprising family entertainment. In the future, when a plane with a cargo of robots crashes off the ...
THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “Paul”
Watch it at home. The genial PAUL really only has one joke–luckily it’s a pretty good one: what if ET had the persona of Seth Rogen? While Paul isn’t the first alien to crack jokes (rememb...
Sundance 2023 Reviews: “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” “Bad Behaviour,” & “Divinity”
SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING: The Office, for depressives. Fran (Daisy Ridley) is the most anonymous member of a nondescript shipping department in a small Oregon town, wrapped in so many layers of emotional insulat...
SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Premiere Review: “Extant”
EXTANT: Wednesday 10PM on CBS Although EXTANT survived to a second season (due at least in part to its lucrative Amazon streaming deal), no one involved fooled themselves that it was going very well, as critical respon...
SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “Salvation”
SALVATION: Wednesday 10PM on CBS CBS’s summer series SALVATION presents a potential end of the world so pedestrian that viewers might fall asleep while awaiting the apocalypse. It’s a disappointment, beca...
THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: Watch It At Home – Not So Amazing Part of the unwritten suspension of disbelief deal we have with the movie studios is that although we know they’re going to constantly tell u...
SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “The Martian”
Ridley Scott’s THE MARTIAN is the jaunty sci-fi offspring of Apollo 13 and McGyver, Scott’s least self-important movie in years and not coincidentally his most enjoyable. Drew Goddard’s expertly craft...
PREMIERING TONIGHT: THE SKED’S PILOT REPORT – “Zero Hour”
ZERO HOUR: Thursday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert ZERO HOUR‘s pilot is an engaging piece of nonsense, but whether it can work as a continuing TV series is another question. The premise is a DaVinci Cod...
THE SKED SEASON FINALE REVIEW: “Fringe”
It is, make no mistake, a wonderful thing that FOX (with the financial cooperation of studio Warner Bros) is bringing FRINGE, one of television’s most distinctive and imaginative shows, back for a 5th and final 13-...
THE SKED FALL FINALE REVIEW: “Revolution”
One of the many ways in which broadcast networks have started to resemble their cable counterparts is in the structure of a series season. For years, cable has aired its shows, especially serialized series, in clearly-...
ShowbuzzDaily Sundance 2022 Reviews: “892” & “After Yang”
892 (no distrib): John Boyega’s turbo-charged performance fuels this true story. In 2017, when Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) entered a Wells Fargo branch in a suburb of Atlanta and informed the teller that his ba...
SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Premiere Review: “The Walking Dead”
THE WALKING DEAD: Sunday 9PM on AMC Last year’s season premiere of THE WALKING DEAD was the show’s most polarizing hour, introducing long-awaited Big Bad Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and lingering on his bru...