The Wire creator’s We Own This City serves as another closely observed analysis of institutional rot.
The actors chew the lurid, shopworn material up to bits, savoring it like a Royale with cheese.
Life pours out of Treme and, like all good things, the series ends with equal parts rage and love in its bombastic heart.
It does for porn-dependence what Shame did for sex addiction by offering a surface-level look at the effects of its specific pathology on its lead male character.
HBO gives the superb second season of David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s post-Katrina drama an excellent transfer.
The show is as much a celebration of New Orleans’s spirit as it is a depiction of the struggle to keep that spirit afloat.
Treme’s deeply humane treatment of a communal tragedy, not a national one, quite simply blows the doors off the place.
By the third episode, the show has developed so much character that even simple glances are steeped in meaning.
Everything is literally and figuratively black and white in The Express.
Stop-Loss is as much about the war in Iraq as it is about making movies-and like its kin, it isn’t any good.
That Stop-Loss wears its generally good intentions on its camo sleeve doesn’t keep it from being consigned to the missed-opportunity file.
Even though it follows every cliché in the book, and then some, Take the Lead delivers on its promise and never feels pandering.
Unlike its many star basketball players, the film is both underachieving and self-hagiographic.
As the film grinds on, Samuel L. Jackson starts to look marooned and eventually seems to give up trying.