Many remarkable things have happened in the world of television over the past few years, but none may be odder than the fact that a story about the 16th century Mary, Queen of Scots ran on network TV for four seasons.  Even more, while REIGN initially squeezed into the CW demographic by concentrating on […]

  THE BIG YEAR:  Watch It At Home – Very Small Pleasures   THE BIG YEAR is an amiable, good-natured comedy that’s so insubstantial it seems to fly out of your memory even as you’re watching it.  If it had been a low-budgeted indie that turned up at a film festival, it might have felt […]

  JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT:  Watch It At Home – Tom Clancy’s Hero Is Plugged Into A Routine Action Movie The fourth movie incarnation of Tom Clancy’s emblematic hero Jack Ryan (in 5 films) finds him much diminished.  Ryan was introduced in Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt For Red October, in 1984, which was filmed […]

  THE WAY, WAY BACK:  Watch It At Home – Modestly Engaging Coming-Of-Age Tale THE WAY, WAY BACK is one of the last real indie hopes for a original breakout hit this summer (it was a big buy out of Sundance, a $10M purchase by Fox Searchlight, the studio behind the Sundance smash Little Miss […]

  THE BUTLER:  Worth A Ticket – Superb Acting Elevates A History Lesson THE BUTLER, in its form and earnestness, recalls the days of prestige TV movies and miniseries that used to be associated with the Hallmark Hall of Fame and network sweeps periods (and which now exist only as a vestige on pay-cable, mostly […]

  MULANEY:  Sunday 9:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel MULANEY arrives with a fair amount of goodwill.  It’s a multicamera sitcom modeled after Seinfeld, and produced by Lorne Michaels.  Its creator/star, John Mulaney, is one of the relatively few SNL writers to have achieved some measure of fame for himself, mostly thanks to his […]

  PUBLIC MORALS:  Tuesday 10PM on TNT – Change the Channel Unless its pilot turns out to be misleading, PUBLIC MORALS looks to be fairly woeful stuff.  The show’s auteur–its star as well as the series creator, writer and director–is Edward Burns, who’s become the forgotten man of American indie film.  Burns’ The Brothers McMullen […]

  X-MEN:  DAYS OF FUTURE PAST:  Buy A Ticket – For Once, The Script Is As Mighty As the CG After the money-making meatball that was Godzilla, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST serves welcome notice that a movie can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, be crammed with CG-generated spectacle, and still have room for an […]