DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
2017
Jun
30
 
 
Tonight’s tense and messy baking competition revolves around a trio of tricky tasks, including an impromptu demand to make, after just one practice try, a dozen well-formed lace pancakes, in the shape of hearts. Batter up! Check local listings.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
30
 
 
Diane Lane, as an actress, has enchanted me for decades – and that enchantment begin with this 1979 movie, which was her cinematic debut. It was a starring role, too, in which she, as a young teenager, played a young teenager – an American girl who attends school in Paris, meets a young French boy (Thelonious Bernard, in what was his screen debut as well), and falls in love, with encouragement from an elderly French grifter, played by Laurence Olivier. A Little Romance is directed, w
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
30
 
 
Led by Ted Turner, the colorization of feature films craze peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s after his company acquired the MGM library and sought to further monetize it...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
29
 
 
You may not have noticed that one of the biggest success stories over the last seven years of television finished its run Tuesday night...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
29
 
 
Would that there were an easy or obvious description of this short that has been making the rounds since last week. A visit to filmmaker David Lewandowski's website leaves it simply at: “Time for Sushi is the latest in a series of short films inspired by an obsessive passion for nonsense..."
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
29
 
 
Mike Nichols made his cinematic directorial debut with this sizzling 1966 drama, a year before injecting movie history with a strong dose of youth serum by releasing The Graduate. This tense, raw argumentative character study – based on the play by Edward Albee, written and staged only four years earlier – stars Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis, who play two couples mired in the political, competitive and stiflingly insular world of academia. It’
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
29
 
 
This 1990 movie, directed by Stephen Frears with an obvious (and successful) goal of producing a modern, sexy, creepy exemplification of film noir, is driven by a trio of superlative performances. John Cusack plays a con man torn between two con women, played by Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston. One portrays his girlfriend, the other his mother – and both, like Cusack, are unforgettable.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
29
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: This is not a recommendation. This is so depressing. It’s depressing enough to realize that I was a working TV critic (in my first year, but still) back when the first Battle of the Network Stars was televised by ABC in 1976. That one was hosted by Howard Cosell, and the participants – divided into teams representing one of the three (count ’em, three) networks – included Robert Conrad, Telly Savalas, Ron Howard, Farrah Fawcett, Lynda Carter, and a surpri
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
29
 
 
This is not a recommendation, either. See above. See the final sentence of the previous entry, at least. Just, whatever you do, don’t see this. Mike Myers or no Mike Myers.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Jun
29
 
 
SEASON PREMIERE: Only the die-hardest of sci-fi fans should give this Season 3 premiere of this CBS summer drama series another chance. Zoo was enough of a mess in Season 1, and even messier in Season 2. Now it’s trying a time-shift reboot. The premise of this series is that a mutated population of animals, in the very near future, threatened to turn against the human race, and did – while an attempted cure led to humans becoming sterilized (don’t ask). That was around 2017, su