This 1941 film is a romantic, very funny movie by Preston Sturges, who directs and co-wrote this breezy story about card hustlers on a cruise ship who target an unsuspecting but wealthy herpetologist (that’s the study of snakes, not herpes). One of the hustlers is a fast-talking, faster-thinking woman who decides to target him more than once, and in more ways than by gambling. And the way she and this movie scores is by the casting: the hustler is played by Barbra Stanwyck, who’s per

2017

Nov

THE LAST WALTZ By David Bianculli

This is an especially appropriate movie to show on Thanksgiving weekend, because this farewell concert by Robbie Robertson and The Band was staged, and filmed, on Thanksgiving night in 1976. The venue was Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and the occasion was the final appearance by the original Band roster of Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manuel. The director is Martin Scorsese, whose corps of brilliant cinematographers included Vilmos Zsig

2017

Nov

DIRK GENTLY'S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY By David Bianculli

Dirk and Todd are lost somewhere – and, more to the point, somewhen – in Wendimoor, where they’re up against evil knights, bad days, and a episode so weird, its title is “This Is Not Miami.” Given the accompanying photograph, no kidding.

2017

Nov

AMAZON’S ‘VIALS’ IS A COMEDY WORTH WATCHING By David Hinckley

Amazon’s new Vials is low-tech TV that delivers high quality...

2017

Nov

CUBA AND THE CAMERAMAN By David Bianculli

DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE: Jon Alpert has been making nonfiction films since 1980, including the unforgettable 2007 HBO project, Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, which was hosted by James Gandolfini, who conducted interviews with veteran soldiers who were lucky to be alive. For even longer than he’s been making movies, Alpert has been visiting Cuba, and his new film, Cuba and the Cameraman, distills his footage and interviews from 45 years’ worth of occasional trips to the long-out-of-

2017

Nov

FRONTIER By David Bianculli

SEASON PREMIERE: This is Season 2 of this period action piece, a co-production of Canada’s Discovery Channel and Netflix. It’s about the fur trade of the 1700s in North America, and how one determined outlaw – Declan Harp, whose heritage is both Native American and Irish – continually challenges and thwarts the economic dominance of the Hudson Bay Company’s monopoly on the fur trade. And the reason there is a Season 2 of Frontier, basically, is because of the rising

2017

Nov

HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS By David Bianculli

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and all through the house, the networks already are beginning to roll out Christmas specials like a landslide of holiday perennials. That’s not so much because TV wants to distract us from Black Friday – if you watch any television with advertising, quite the contrary – but because there’s such a backlog of Christmas specials that unless the networks begin showing them immediately after Thanksgiving, they’ll never have time to

2017

Nov

FROSTY THE SNOWMAN By David Bianculli

This Christmas special from the same decade – specifically, from 1969 – isn’t as good, and isn’t on my list of favorite TV Christmas specials. The writer, Romeo Muller, expands the popular holiday song into a passable narrative, as he had with another early TV holiday special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But face it: Neither of those is A Charlie Brown Christmas. But at least Jimmy Durante narrates, which counts for something.

2017

Nov

GRAMMY’S GREATEST STORIES: A 60TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL By David Bianculli

SPECIAL PREMIERE: Producer Ken Ehrlich has been overseeing fabulous performance pairings at the Grammys for decades, and is one of the most tasteful and, at times daring, music producers on television. (He also, he told me once, got every performer to sign a personal scrapbook for him, often with scraps of their own lyrics, which must be an amazing book by now.) At Ehrlich’s first Grammys show, he paired Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond for a live performance of “You Don’t Bri

2017

Nov

GREAT PERFORMANCES: “IRVING BERLIN’S HOLIDAY INN” By David Bianculli

SPECIAL PREMIERE: Holiday Inn is another Broadway musical that was filmed, and shown in select movie theaters at the same time it was performed live, by BroadwayHD. This co-production with New York’s WNET-Ch. 13 now surfaces on PBS’s “Broadway Best” lineup – and by the way, I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of the story why last week’s scheduled production of the Harold Prince tribute musical mysteriously vanished. But this sort of jukebox modern musi

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