Here's a new Funny or Die video that serves two purposes. One is political, in that it has Kristen Bell, as the magical singing governess personified by Julie Andrews in Disney's Mary Poppins, quitting her job because she refuses to work for the current federal minimum wage...

2014

Jul

MASTERPIECE MYSTERY!: "POIROT" By David Bianculli

MINISERIES RETURN: This is the conclusion of a truly, and literally, Herculean labor. It’s the conclusion of actor David Suchet’s commitment to starring in all 70 Agatha Christie stories centered around the self-satisfied Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. It’s a role he began playing a quarter of a century ago, and this final season, number 13, presents the final five stories in the canon, presented as feature-length telemovies. Tonight and next Sunday, PBS presents the first t

2014

Jul

TRUE BLOOD By David Bianculli

Unlike, say, Dexter, which totally ran out of steam its final season, HBO’s True Blood has really been revitalized for its last lap, and has remembered to have fun while doing it. So the fresh plots, as well as the newly revealed flashbacks, sizzle with energy and wit – and sometimes, as with this scene featuring a captured Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) and Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten), the threat of impending sunlight.

2014

Jul

MANHATTAN By David Bianculli

SERIES PREMIERE: This is WGN America’s second scripted drama series, and it’s even more ambitious than Salem. Manhattan is a period piece about the Manhattan Project, the top-secret development of the atomic bomb, but is unlike Oppenheimer, the superb miniseries from a previous generation. That drama starred Sam Waterston as the brilliant physicist in charge of the project, while Manhattan, at least initially, visits J. Robert Oppenheimer only peripherally, and focuses instead on tho

2014

Jul

THE STRAIN By David Bianculli

Creepy, creepy, creepy. In tonight’s episode three, the evil invading and infecting New York becomes more tangible, the villain becomes more identifiable – and the rats go crazy, in the lab, and out of it.

2014

Jul

MASTERS OF SEX By David Bianculli

What drives William Masters (William Sheen) towards such a rebellious and controversial field of study? Tonight, we get a little insight into that question, thanks to an examination of his far from idyllic childhood.

2014

Jul

WWI: THE FIRST MODERN WAR By David Bianculli

MINISERIES PREMIERE: On the 100th anniversary of the start of what eventually was called World War I, History Channel presents something that’s fairly unusual: an actual nonfiction miniseries about history. Its four hours, presented in one mammoth burst tonight, make the case that WWI introduced modern warfare on several fronts – in this case, literally. And with tanks, zeppelins, submarines and chemical weapons all employed, it makes for a strong argument. Armored Beasts begins the

2014

Jul

METROPOLIS By David Bianculli

This 2010 restoration of Fritz Lang’s silent classic takes the 1926 original, with one of the cinema’s first visions of a dystopian urban future, and lovingly, painstakingly pieces together as much of the film as possible – including descriptions of long-missing scenes as described in the final screenplay version. Metropolis is a fascinating movie to watch – expressionistic, futuristic and fantastic all at once. And Brigitte Helm, in the dual role of worker-heroine Maria

2014

Jul

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS By David Bianculli

Entertainment, A. Spelling, F. This 2009 Quentin Tarantino film is one of the most playfully entertaining WWII films since Kelly’s Heroes – and leapfrogs that movie by rewriting history even as it revisits it. And Christoph Waltz, in this movie, gets the role of a lifetime, and the role that he seems born to play.

2014

Jul

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK By David Bianculli

When John Carpenter directed and co-wrote this 1981 movie, he imagined a frightening future in which Manhattan has been repurposed as a maximum-security prison – and in which planes can be shot out of the sky. (In this case, it’s Air Force One, and the President is taken down and held prisoner by rioting convicts, necessitating a government-sanctioned rescue mission by Kurt Russell’s one-eyed Snake.) That’s all plenty weird – but what’s really scary about this

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