This is not a recommendation: This is Fox’s meta reboot of Beverly Hills, 90210, in which many of the stars from the original teen soap play now much older, caricatured versions of themselves. Is the joke still on them, if they’re making fun of themselves? That’s a question you might want to ponder while watching this new series – but I don’t want to ponder or watch. And Fox wasn’t making this available for preview by critics

2019

Aug

HYPNOTIZE ME By David Bianculli

SERIES PREMIERE: This new CW summer series is a new U.S. variant on the British show You’re Back in the Room, which turns stage hypnosis into a non-interactive TV experience. (In other words, you just watch, and, unlike seeing a similar act in Las Vegas or elsewhere, have no danger of being called up from the audience as a volunteer.) With another British show, Love Island, already invading America successfully this summer, on CBS, it would be foolish to dism

2019

Aug

OLD ADDRESS, NEW APPROACH IN FOX'S 'BH90210' By Ed Bark

The address is CBS for the most success with TV reboots. The most famous address of all, though, belongs to Fox...

2019

Aug

THE NEW WOODSTOCK DOCUMENTARY AT TCA By Roger Catlin

If Michael Wadleigh’s original 1970 Woodstock documentary concentrated on the music of the iconic rock festival, a new 50th-anniversary look at the event turns its focus largely away from the stage...

2019

Aug

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION By David Bianculli

This wonderful movie was released 25 years ago – and to honor its silver anniversary, my friend and fellow critic Mark Dawidziak has written a new companion book, The Shawshank Redemption: One Story Kept Hope Alive, that will be published Friday. (You can pre-order it on Amazon, and elsewhere.) The book is really good – and so, of course, is Frank Darabont’s movie, based on a story by Stephen King and starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. See the movie. Then reads

2019

Aug

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: “WOODSTOCK: THREE DAYS THAT DEFINED A GENERATION” By David Bianculli

DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE: You’ve seen the movie. You’ve heard the soundtrack. You’ve even heard Joni Mitchell’s anthemic account of the seminal music and arts fair held in August 1969 in Bethel, NY. So why watch a new account, one that’s less about performance footage and more about the recorded music and national mood of the period? Because the perspective here is informative, and relatively clear-eyed. It also adds new elements to the story, such as the surprising fac

2019

Aug

DRUNK HISTORY By David Bianculli

SEASON FINALE: When I was in high school, I wrote term papers for money – not much money, and I was learning by researching and writing, so I have little residual guilt from my formative writing experiences. Anyway, the way I taught my children my old tricks, back in the days when libraries and books remained plentiful, was to use an assignment in Modern European History as an example. Go to the stacks in the library where that general topic is housed, pull out a book, and go straight to t

2019

Aug

'WOODSTOCK: THREE DAYS THAT DEFINED A GENERATION.' OR MAYBE NOT. By David Hinckley

The 1969 Woodstock festival was not the most significant flashpoint of the 1960s counterculture, but it has always been the most over-romanticized...

2019

Aug

JAWS By David Bianculli

Last week, the new CNN series The Movies celebrated “The Seventies,” and smack-dab in the middle of that decade was Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller about a killer shark. That documentary about moviemaking marveled at the difficulty of what Spielberg was attempting at every turn, and how unfailingly he stuck the landing. There was particular praise for the fabulous scene, between shark attacks in a small craft on the open sea, in which the show’s three leading a

2019

Aug

LEGION By David Bianculli

Legion is about to end. Three seasons of time-tripping, mind-blowing and reality-warping drama has just two more episodes – tonight’s and next Monday’s – to conclude what I consider the most dazzlingly visual, surrealistic, and imaginative TV series since The Prisoner and Twin Peaks. And the way I watch Legion is the way I remember watching 2001: A Space Odyssey the first time: I’ll experience it now, and try to make as m

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