DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
2019
Nov
1
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: The entire Apple TV+ streaming service launches today. All the programming is brand new, but much of it, at the outset, is decidedly average. Of the initial offerings, the best is this new series from Battlestar Galactica reimaginer Ronald D. Moore. Once again, he’s reimagining things. This time, in a drama starring Joel Kinnaman as a 1960s U.S. astronaut, For All Mankind presents an alternate world history in which the Soviets won the space race by lan
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Nov
1
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: This is the big Apple TV+ flagship program. Steve Carell, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon play rising and falling stars in the highly competitive world of morning television. I don’t fault the acting, but the writing is so predictable, and the characters so caricatured and emptily preachy, that this is not a Morning Show I’d bother to watch. Yet Apple TV+ has given it a two-year, 20-episode commitment already, and thrown more money at it than, perhap
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Nov
1
 
 
Fridays in prime time this month are devoted to “Dennis Miller and Friends.” The good news is that Miller invites a different friend each week, to show and discuss favorite films. (The better news: none of them is showing Miller’s Bordello of Blood.) Tonight, Miller’s guest is Martin Short – and that star’s cinematic Short list is an impressively intelligent roster. The Marx Brothers’ 1933 anti-war romp, Duck Soup, starts things off a
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Nov
1
 
 
Among tonight’s scheduled guests: Author and journalist Ronan Farrow.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Oct
31
 
 
Television always pulls out its inventory of scary movies on Halloween, and TCM has so many of them, it’s rolling them out early. So early, in fact, that one of the best of them shows up just after sunrise, when Tod Browning’s Freaks is shown at 6:45 a.m. ET. What a perfect way to start this particular day…
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Oct
31
 
 
In 1965, Roman Polanski directed Repulsion, a creepily claustrophobic film about a young woman (played beautifully by Catherine Deneuve) descending into madness. Three years later, he directed this adaptation of an Ira Levin novel, and this time cast young Mia Farrow as a woman who thinks she’s imagining things and being paranoid, and maybe even going insane. But, in this case, maybe she’s not…
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Oct
31
 
 
James Whale directed this superb sequel to his Frankenstein movie in 1935, allowing Boris Karloff to reprise his starring, mostly grunting role as Frankenstein’s Monster – but also allowing the sequel to be stolen by Elsa Lanchester, in the dual role of Mary Shelley (the actual author of the original Frankenstein novel) and, when brought back from the dead, as the punk-coiffed Monster’s Mate.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Oct
31
 
 
The one-non-Halloweeny offering mentioned in tonight’s Best Bets is this new final-season episode of The Good Place, titled “A Chip Driver Mystery.”  But perhaps, given the hellish twists and turns this Michael Schur sitcom has served up so far, maybe it fits the night’s theme, and mood, after all.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Oct
31
 
 
This is my favorite ghoulish movie on TV today – and one of my favorite movies ever, because it’s sort of like a murder-spree cross between Shakespeare and A Fish Called Wanda. And it’s educational, too: This 1973 Vincent Price movie is where I first learned about Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s over-the-top bloodbath of a stage drama. The plot has Price, as a has-been Shakespearean actor, returning from seeming oblivion to wreak revenge on his hostile
 
 
 
  
 
 
2019
Oct
31
 
 
And here’s Vincent Price again, to cap off the evening – and, maybe, lop off a head – in this 1961 movie version of the classic Edgar Allan Poe short story. Barbara Steele co-stars (Price certainly knew how to pick his leading ladies), and look who’s working behind the scenes: Roger Corman not only produces, but directs – and the screenplay is an adaptation by that wonderful writer, Richard Matheson, whose other screen credits, large and small, include The Incr