Watching Matthew Weiner's upcoming The Romanoffs and Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's Camping, I couldn't get over the feeling I had seen these seriously flawed series before — and it was Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal back in 2002. Coming off the Oscar success of Traffic and the box office hit Ocean's Eleven…

Damien Chazelle proves himself to be one of the more versatile directors around, following Oscar-nominated hits like Whiplash and La La Land by tackling a completely different genre — outer space — and succeeding admirably in bringing the story of Apollo 11’s first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, to life in the…

"It kind of pushed me in a different way, I had to be very adaptable and also really hyper-focused to know exactly what came before and what was going to come after the scene we were doing, what episode we were in, where the characters were at," Dakota Fanning says on this week’s edition of Next Generation TV…

Full of bitterness, spite, snobbery, sarcasm, self-loathing, abuse, addiction and recovery, Showtime's limited series Patrick Melrose is simply an irresistible tour de force from Benedict Cumberbatch that I cannot recommend strongly enough. Debuting on May 12, the five-episode series is based on Edward St. Aubyn's…

The great director Sidney Lumet brought a beautifully acted version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull to the screen in 1968, but apparently it has taken another half-century to get a another version that gives Chekhov’s 1895 play a new spin in movies. I have to say, the new The Seagull compares favorably to any previous…

With a pedigree that includes Six Feet Under and Dexter, Michael C. Hall has never retreated from risky projects, but his new series Safe certainly would never be characterized in that way. A case of honesty in advertising if nothing else, the UK-set Netflix series that launches May 10 is almost entirely without…

"Find your way back home" is the tagline for Vida, but this new Starz drama is in many ways a road map into the real American mosaic of 2018 in all its messy, hurtful, complex and heartfelt glory. With gender, culture, economics, family, sexuality, conflict and unconventional wisdom at its often raw core, the May…

She’s an icon. She’s been parodied by Kate McKinnon on SNL. She is despised. She is revered. She has no peer. Finally, a documentary tells the truth from all sides about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who became the second female ever appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since that momentous event she’s still going strong at 84…

Nothing any critic can say will deter you from seeing Avengers: Infinity War if you are the least bit inclined in the first place. The good news, as I say in my video review above, is that this 2 1/2-hour all-star affair is actually worth your time — despite being a Whitman’s Sampler Box of the Marvel Universe that…

Amy Schumer’s very R-rated film breakthrough Trainwreck was a hit with critics and audiences looking for the kind of edgy material that made the self-confident and raunchily funny comic a success before Hollywood came calling. Her star vehicle with Goldie Hawn last year, Snatched, was not well received but carried the…

Following a Sundance Film Festival debut in January, Netflix unveiled Come Sunday, its true-life religious story of the Rev. Carlton Pearson, over the weekend on its streaming service and in some theaters. I caught it Sunday (naturally), but the low-energy dramatics didn’t grab me, with the exception of the lead…

After the smash success of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle there can be no question that Dwayne Johnson is the superstar action hero of the moment, and while we wait for his upcoming heroics in saving the world’s tallest building in Skyscraper, we have his attempts to save Chicago from three rampaging genetically…