MONDAY
AUGUST 3
2020

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

TCM, 6:00 a.m. ET

Rita Hayworth is the focus of today’s “Summer Under the Stars” salute on TCM, and the salute begins at 6 a.m. ET with Renegade Ranger, a 1938 film that is her earliest one in this retrospective. But not the earliest: she already had appeared in more than two dozen movies by then. Today’s “Summer Under the Stars” Hayworth tribute continues through 4 a.m. Tuesday, when TCM shows 1972’s The Wrath of God, which was Hayworth’s last film. (It was not, however, the same film as that same year’s similarly titled Aguirre, The Wrath of God, a 16th-century adventure story directed by Werner Herzog. Hayworth’s Wrath of God was a Western.) In between those two Hayworth offerings, on TCM, are some of her most famous screen appearances. Watch, in particular, for her in 1948’s The Lady from Shanghai (8 p.m. ET) and, of course, 1946’s Gilda (pictured, at 10 p.m. ET).
 
  
 
 

Sundance, 8:00 p.m. ET

John Singleton wrote and directed this 1991 movie, a dazzling directorial debut that got powerful performances from the cast – and had powerful things to say about race. Those statements and observations are just as relevant today as they were almost 30 years ago, and that’s awful. The movie, however, is excellent. Laurence Fishburne is unforgettable as one of the most outspoken and observant residents of his ghetto Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles. And really good, too, are Ice Cube, Angela Bassett, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.
 
  
 
 

AXS TV, 9:00 p.m. ET

Cameron Crowe stuck the landing, and everything else, as the writer and director of this 2000 movie, which stars Patrick Fugit as William Miller, a laughably young and unsophisticated rock journalist for Rolling Stone – an alter ego stand-in for Crowe himself. Billy Crudup and Jason Lee are delightful as two members of the rock band William is chronicling, as are the young women playing the band’s groupies: Anna Paquin, Fairuza Balk, and, in a star-making turn as Penny Lane, Kate Hudson. And there are other scene-stealers, too, with the grandest thefts pulled off by Philip Seymour Hoffman as rock critic Lester Bangs, Zooey Deschanel as William’s supportive and rebellious older sister, and, most of all, Frances McDormand as William’s understandably concerned mother.
 
  
 
 

HBO, 11:06 p.m. ET

This week’s Axios installment is the full-length conversation, recorded last week and shown in pieces on MSNBC and elsewhere, in which Axios reporter Jonathan Swan asked some very good questions, in a one-on-one interview, of President Donald Trump.
 
  
 
 
 
 
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David Bianculli

Founder / Editor

David Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975, including a 14-year stint at the New York Daily News, and sees no reason to stop now. Currently, he's TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and is an occasional substitute host for that show. He's also an author and teaches TV and film history at New Jersey's Rowan University. His 2009 Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', has been purchased for film rights. His latest, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific, is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age to today’s era of quality TV.