TV amp; Movies Reviews

Some actors you just take for granted. You see them constantly popping up, beautifully supporting the above-the-marquee names, nailing a killer line here, stealthily stealing a scene or two there. Audiences turn in to the real-life equivalent of the DiCaprio-in-Once-Upon-a-Time-in-Hollywood meme whenever these performers show up. These familiar faces become …

A warning, to be issued immediately and upfront: You might not want to see The Humans directly before or after a holiday dinner. Should potential viewers still be suffering from PTSD regarding their Turkey Day get-together, or spend the bulk of their weekly therapy sessions dreading the thought of a …

The strangeness of Clint Eastwood’s Cry Macho cannot be boiled down to any one thing — there’s a lot going on — but its origins as a movie, one starring and directed by this particular Hollywood figure, no less, are surprisingly scattered. In so many ways, the movie plays like …

Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, has been hanging out in the MCU since 2010, often memorable but rarely the star. Her first appearance was, after all, in Iron Man 2: someone else’s movie. Somehow, despite being played by Scarlett Johansson, even Ant-Man snuck ahead of her in line for his …

Liam Neeson has fought terrorists, mobsters, aliens, Nazis, the British army (in Ireland and Scotland), Sith Lords, Batman, feral wolves, and the sexual peccadillos of 20th century America. Now, the hulking, 69-year-old Irish actor faces his greatest threat yet: ice. Specifically, those North American roads that form over frozen bodies …

This year, Sparks celebrate half a century as America’s ultimate cult band — a group with a discography marginally less daunting to newcomers than Frank Zappa’s. None of the nearly two-dozen studio records they’ve released since ditching the admittedly terrible name Halfnelson sound alike (are they glam? pop? prog? new-wave? …

At first glance, Sweet Tooth seems like an odd title for a post-apocalyptic drama, particularly one about an apocalypse caused by a virus, which has the unfortunate timing to arrive while we are still digging our way out from under Covid. But once we get to know its adorable young …

There is typecasting, and then there is Cristin Milioti‘s career the last few years, where she has repeatedly been hired to play strong-willed women trapped by some useless dude in a science-fiction nightmare. First there was “U.S.S. Callister,” her fantastic episode of Black Mirror, where she found herself uploaded into …

One wonders what Notorious B.I.G would have thought about smartphones. The late New York MC, who is the subject of a new Netflix documentary titled Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, was an eager evangelist of the humble camcorder. Early on in the documentary, his longtime friend Damion “D-Roc” …

I have never read All Creatures Great and Small, nor any of the follow-up novels by Alf Smith, written under his pen name of James Herriot. Nor did I watch the beloved TV version that ran in the UK and on PBS for seven seasons across the late Seventies and …