SEASON PREMIERE: This is the eighth cycle for this inventive, always changing drama series – and tonight, a widespread terror brings some of this year’s characters to a familiar place, where they’re forced to remain trapped inside. And where they encounter some familiar faces and characters, at least to viewers who have watched other of this series’ many iterations.

2018

Sep

A PROGRAM THAT ENCOURAGES YOU TO PLAY ALONG: PBS' 'THE GREAT AMERICAN READ' By David Hinckley

If any campaign can cross party lines this summer, it should be the one PBS has launched: It wants us to read books...

2018

Sep

THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW By David Bianculli

In my TV History & Appreciation of the ’60s and ’70s class, current events keep intruding, and making me restructure some of my lectures, clips, and historical comparisons. My section on breaking news coverage of the 1970s, for example, used to spend a lot of time on Watergate, but I thought such chapters in that story as, say, the Saturday night massacre, or the indefatigability of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were going too deeply into the weeds. But now, the thre

2018

Sep

MAYANS M.C. By David Bianculli

Tonight’s second episode of this series sets up the show’s major conflicts – and, as with its parent series Sons of Anarchy, the structure is in part Shakespearean, with rival families (okay, motorcycle clubs) and powerful rulers (okay, drug cartel chieftains) vying for power and influence. And in tonight’s show, there’s a kidnapping that brings these stories together, while tearing the warring factions apart. But after two hours of this new series, I’m neithe

2018

Sep

BETTER CALL SAUL By David Bianculli

Last week’s episode was, quite simply, an astounding hour of television, in the patient yet precise way it began to connect the dots that must, in time, lead from the optimism of Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill in this series to the cynicism of his eventual adopted alter ego of Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad. For Jimmy to become the Saul we know in Breaking Bad, he has to lose his optimism. This season, he’s already lost his older brother (the relationship was complicated, but still

2018

Sep

PERFORMANCE By David Bianculli

This 1970 cult film has as one of its co-directors Nicolas Roeg, which explains its visual exuberance and inventiveness. But the real reason to watch it is that it was an early, largely unsuccessful foray by Mick Jagger to become a movie star. He plays a former rock star, so it isn’t much of a stretch, but there also is a mob story, and a lot of fantasy – and, it should be mentioned, Anita Pallenberg as Jagger’s female co-star. She’s the actress and former model who

2018

Sep

FORGET THE PROSAIC TITLE: NETFLIX’S ‘DEADWIND’ IS COMPELLING, ADULT DRAMA AT ITS FINEST AND MOST ADDICTIVE By Alex Strachan

Misdirection and good directing can — and sometimes do — go hand-in-hand. Take Deadwind, for example...

2018

Sep

CARREY SHINES THROUGH, OCCASIONALLY DARKLY, IN SHOWTIME'S ONE-OF-A-KIND 'KIDDING' By Ed Bark

This has been a big year for Fred Rogers, who’s been extolled in a first-rate documentary film and is now reprised in fragile form via Jim Carrey as Mr. Pickles...

2018

Sep

'REL' IS AN UNFORTUNATE THROWBACK THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THROWN BACK By Ed Bark

The first new fall series from a Big Four broadcasting network is broad, loud, stereotypical and affixed with a howling laugh track. What were you thinking, Fox?...

2018

Sep

'THE MINIATURIST' IS AS BEAUTIFUL AS IT IS CRYPTIC By David Hinckley

A dozen scenes in The Miniaturist, the TV adaptation of Jessie Burton’s best-selling 2014 novel, look as if they could have been photoshopped directly from a Vermeer painting...

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