TV amp; Movies Reviews

Long before he made Popeye Doyle race a Brooklyn subway and Regan MacNeil’s head spin, William Friedkin began his career doing live TV. He’d move on to an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, short documentaries, a Sonny-and-Cher joint (Good Times), theatrical adaptations (The Birthday Party, The Boys in the …

A handful of the faithful and the pious might have been able to tell you what an exorcist was, or what they did, before the early 1970s. After William Friedkin’s blockbuster adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling horror novel hit screens in 1973, however, the term instantly became part of …

A combination of modern loneliness and New Age woo-woo has convinced a great many people not merely that they need a soulmate, but that, through some unwritten promise of the universe, they are owed one. This belief, along with the more modest goal of a quick hookup, has kept countless …

You have an Oscar-nominated actor who’s played everything from queens to killing machines. You’ve paired her with a performer who is arguably the hottest, most in-demand next-gen leading man of the moment. The source material is the second novel from an acclaimed writer, whose first book (I’m Thinking of Ending …

Early in the new season of Netflix‘s Lupin, a pair of reporters argue about the best way to cover the continuing saga of Assane Diop, the master thief who has become a celebrity and cult hero in their native France. As the writers consider Assane’s story so far — depicted …

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has become 2023’s cultural boogeyman — the vengeful ghost in the machine that now seems closer than ever to possibly “replacing” humanity. (Or, at the very least, replicating our worst instincts and darker desires in a way that’s too dangerous to laugh off.) Musicians, …

The golden rule is usually, “Show, don’t tell.” And Wes Anderson is a filmmaker who — judging by the overly meticulous mise-en-scène, the highly mannered methods of his storytelling, the obsessive curating and compulsive footnoting of onscreen bric-a-brac — seems to love the structure that comes with obeying unwritten rules. …

Great documentaries tend to tell messy stories in a way that somehow makes them clear, honoring the messiness all the while. Such is the case with Savior Complex, HBO’s new three-part doc that digs into some contentious issues – including colonialism, medical ethics, religious fervor, and the limits of activism …

The London tabloid world has traditionally been a sort of journalism Bizarro World, where entrapment is standard practice and news is manufactured on a profit-driven whim, often at the expense of innocent victims. For two decades, Mazher Mahmood strode over this ethics-starved world like a corrupt colossus, enabled by his …

Sean Penn knows what you think of him. Several minutes into the two-time Oscar winner’s new film, Superpower, ostensibly a documentary about the battle-hardened president of Ukraine, Penn’s gravelly voice answers a question posed in interviews past: Who do you think you are, Walter Cronkite? You have a savior complex? …