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With its beautifully illustrative animation, reminiscent of a children’s book, and its bittersweet, reassuring story, this is a film kids will take to heart… and one parents can feel comfortable about letting them do so. With her overworked, mostly absent parents on the verge of divorce and her 23-year-old tutor — the one she has … more…
Based on James Baldwin’s powerful novel, this 1985 movie from PBS’s American Playhouse is a heart-wrenching tale of tragedy, hypocrisy, and a hard-heartedness born of hard times. Following the journeys — physical, spiritual, and emotional — of three generations of one African-American family, from the post-Civil War rural South to Harlem in the 1930s, this … more…
Nine years after its multiple-Emmy-winning debut season, ER‘s combination of intense medical realism and dishy doctor soap opera has inspired a devoted fan following, and this jam-packed set will be catnip to them. A look back at where these now-beloved characters got their start — burnt-out resident Mark Green (Anthony Edwards), naive med student John … more…
Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, the classic story of star-crossed lovers amidst a backdrop of the social upheaval of the Russian Revolution, gets a stunning new production via British television and PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. Adapted by Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice) and starring two appealing young rising stars, this is a grimly beautiful production electrifyingly … more…
There’s something a little bit scary about this cascade of daytime soaps at their most outrageously soapy. Maybe it’s the bombardment of ridiculous wedding dresses and bizarre veils. Maybe it’s the actors talking about their characters as if they’re real people. Maybe it’s the hosts of the General Hospital segment, Jackie Zeman and Brad Maule, … more…
The decadent 18th-century French novel gets yet another mounting, this time around with the seduction and the betrayal and the general mean-spiritedness time-traveling to the 1960s. Better it had remained in the past. The cast is undeniably attractive — Catherine Deneuve as the spiteful Madame de Merteuil, Rupert Everett as the Don Juan-ish Valmont, and … more…
It’s mired in the dirt and the grime of 17th-century France, but there’s a kind of soaring beauty to this expansively passionate film, 1990’s Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Film, perhaps the grandest adaptation yet of Edmond Rostand’s verse about the swordsman, adventurer, poet, and would-be lover whose heart is held in check by … more…
A Finnish sniper branded a coward and abandoned by his fellow soldiers. A Russian captain, the only survivor of a road accident en route to his own court-martial. A Lapp war widow trying to keep her farm afloat. In 1944, in rural Lapland, these three, political enemies and cultural strangers, come together just as World … more…
After a blockbuster debut on NBC in 1986, this grim series wallowed in the ratings basement and was condemned for its unflattering portrayal of cops, its violence termed “X-rated” by one police organization. Today, its nihilistic attitude feels thoroughly modern, a stark vision of obsession and pursuit from executive producer Michael Mann (Collateral, Manhunter). A … more…
Even those with no background in appreciating the sensuous, inky brushstrokes of Asian painting will be enthralled by this majestic and reflective biography of Jang Seung-up, considered Korea’s greatest artist. Some aspects will be familiar to fans of the artist-exposed biopic — the drinking, the philandering, the general debauchery — but director Im Kwon-Taek and … more…
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