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

 
 
2019
Aug
7
 
 
This is not a recommendation: This is Fox’s meta reboot of Beverly Hills, 90210, in which many of the stars from the original teen soap play now much older, caricatured versions of themselves. Is the joke still on them, if they’re making fun of themselves? That’s a question you might want to ponder while watching this new series – but I don’t want to ponder or watch. And Fox wasn’t making this available for preview by critics
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
7
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: This new CW summer series is a new U.S. variant on the British show You’re Back in the Room, which turns stage hypnosis into a non-interactive TV experience. (In other words, you just watch, and, unlike seeing a similar act in Las Vegas or elsewhere, have no danger of being called up from the audience as a volunteer.)  With another British show, Love Island, already invading America successfully this summer, on CBS, it would be foolish to dism
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
7
 
 
The address is CBS for the most success with TV reboots. The most famous address of all, though, belongs to Fox...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
7
 
 
Police procedurals from other countries, some English-speaking and some not, have become the lifeblood of multiple streaming and cable services these days...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
6
 
 
If Michael Wadleigh’s original 1970 Woodstock documentary concentrated on the music of the iconic rock festival, a new 50th-anniversary look at the event turns its focus largely away from the stage...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
6
 
 
This wonderful movie was released 25 years ago – and to honor its silver anniversary, my friend and fellow critic Mark Dawidziak has written a new companion book, The Shawshank Redemption: One Story Kept Hope Alive, that will be published Friday. (You can pre-order it on Amazon, and elsewhere.) The book is really good – and so, of course, is Frank Darabont’s movie, based on a story by Stephen King and starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. See the movie. Then reads
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
6
 
 
DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE: You’ve seen the movie. You’ve heard the soundtrack. You’ve even heard Joni Mitchell’s anthemic account of the seminal music and arts fair held in August 1969 in Bethel, NY. So why watch a new account, one that’s less about performance footage and more about the recorded music and national mood of the period? Because the perspective here is informative, and relatively clear-eyed. It also adds new elements to the story, such as the surprising fac
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
6
 
 
SEASON FINALE: When I was in high school, I wrote term papers for money – not much money, and I was learning by researching and writing, so I have little residual guilt from my formative writing experiences. Anyway, the way I taught my children my old tricks, back in the days when libraries and books remained plentiful, was to use an assignment in Modern European History as an example. Go to the stacks in the library where that general topic is housed, pull out a book, and go straight to t
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
6
 
 
The 1969 Woodstock festival was not the most significant flashpoint of the 1960s counterculture, but it has always been the most over-romanticized...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Aug
5
 
 
Last week, the new CNN series The Movies celebrated “The Seventies,” and smack-dab in the middle of that decade was Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller about a killer shark. That documentary about moviemaking marveled at the difficulty of what Spielberg was attempting at every turn, and how unfailingly he stuck the landing. There was particular praise for the fabulous scene, between shark attacks in a small craft on the open sea, in which the show’s three leading a