“Here’s what you need to know about Russia’s ambassador to the US,” the Washington Post told readers, in its Friday edition. Joe Weisberg, the former CIA case officer who co-created The Americans with Joel Fields, could be forgiven for allowing himself a small laugh...

2017

Mar

WOMAN OF THE YEAR By David Bianculli

This 1942 movie comedy, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their first, utterly electric screen pairing, is one of the funniest and most insightful movies ever made about the newspaper business. They’re delightful together, and her character is such an early feminist that she’s got to be considered groundbreaking, even given all the strong women in film in the previous decade. Of note, too, is that Oscar-winning screenwriters Ring Lardner, Jr. and Michael Kanin were so y

2017

Mar

WHEN WE RISE By David Bianculli

MINISERIES FINALE: Part 4 of 4. This four-part dramatization of LGBT rights concludes tonight. The ratings haven’t been terrific, but the effort has been a noble one – even for the miniseries as a genre. The broadcast networks almost never attempt this sort of multi-part commitment any more.

2017

Mar

REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER By David Bianculli

The last time environmental author Bill McKibben was on Real Time with Bill Maher, five years ago (pictured), he memorably told Maher, “We broke the Arctic.” Wonder what he’s going to say in 2017, making a return visit as one of this week’s scheduled guests, just as the Environmental Protection Agency comes under new management.

2017

Mar

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN By David Bianculli

This impressively informed parody of the Frankenstein films is only one of the two brilliant movies directed and co-written by Mel Brooks in 1974. (The other is Blazing Saddles. As film vintages go, for Mr. Brooks, not a bad year.) Starring and co-written by the equally gifted Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein draws liberally, and inspiringly, from several movies in Universal’s Frankenstein canon, and gets the most out of so, so many cast members, from Wilder as the mad Dr. Frankenstein to M

2017

Mar

Z By David Bianculli

TCM has saluted the Oscars, for more than a month, by presenting Oscar-winning movies alphabetically, from A to Z – and finally, as the last movie in this very long, entertainingly random celebration, here comes Z. It’s the 1969 French-Algerian film by Costa-Gavras, it’s intensely and overtly political, and it couldn’t be more unsettlingly relevant. Originally presented during the start of the Nixon administration, it’s a drama, and a warning, about how civil libert

2017

Mar

WEST SIDE STORY By David Bianculli

TCM is up to W in its alphabetical salute to the Oscars – and that means West Side Story, one of the best movie musicals ever made, gets a prime-time showing tonight. This 1969 version of the Broadway musical, with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, choreography by Jerome Robbins, and starring performances by Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, and Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn and Beymer would reunite in the original Twin Peaks TV series – and are reuniting again

2017

Mar

WHEN WE RISE By David Bianculli

Night III. Tonight’s episode, the third of four, takes the narrative up to the early 1990s, as Cleve (Guy Pearce) devotes himself to organizing the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt – while feeling the effects of AIDS all around him, and within him.

2017

Mar

RIVERDALE By David Bianculli

Last week, I offended a few TVWW readers by writing about Riverdale with a phrase considered uncomfortably cavalier and insensitive. I apologize. I should have said something closer to the phrase that Riverdale was “like a shotgun wedding between Twin Peaks and Gossip Girl.” We live, we learn. So tonight, I’m treading softly. Tonight’s episode, in which Archie, and Josie and the Pussycats perform at the annual Riverdale variety talent show, is titled “Faster, Pussyc

2017

Mar

THE HISTORY OF COMEDY By David Bianculli

Tonight’s installment in this impressively thoughtful miniseries is called “Spark of Madness” – a phrase attributed to, and applicable to, Robin Williams – whose moods and mental afflictions, and those of other gifted but partly troubled comedians, are the subject of tonight’s hour.

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