What’s good, bad and happening, from pop culture to high culture | Page 5

+Review Movies | 329 days ago

The Adjustment Bureau: Matt Damon's Battle of the Angels

George Nolfi’s up-and-down movie, The Adjustment Bureau, sees two lovers who fight the system to forge their own destiny together after they determine the random occurrences in life aren’t so random

+Uncategorized | 329 days ago

Idol Watch: Did America Get It Right? Did the Judges? And Who Really Has a Shot?

By James Poniewozik

Quick spoilers for last night’s American Idol selection for finalists: Last night on American Idol‘s two-hour[!] results episode—the reason DVR fast-forward buttons were invented—America and the judges’ panel winnowed down 24 semifinalists to …

+Uncategorized | 329 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Anthony Bourdain's Guilty Pleasure

By James Poniewozik

Surprise: My column in the redesigned culture section of TIME this week is not about Charlie Sheen! The other day I posted briefly about the season-debut Haiti episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. For the column I screened more of the upcoming episodes and spoke to Bourdain about how his show uses food as a [...]

+Review Movies | 330 days ago

Take Me Home Tonight: '80s Nostalgia, with Cocaine

By Mary Pols

Despite the drug scenes, Topher Grace’s new film, Take Me Home Tonight, is faithful to the John Hughes classics of another era, complete with a nostalgic kindness for its teen protagonists

+Uncategorized | 330 days ago

Game of Thrones' Creator Adding Book to Series

By James Poniewozik

When HBO announced that it was picking up the fantasy series Game of Thrones, many fans of the source books rejoiced—but with a caveat. The book series, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire was planned as a seven-book series (it started as a trilogy, then grew), but Martin had been stalled [...]

+Uncategorized | 330 days ago

The Morning After: Troubadours

By James Poniewozik

It’s easy to engage an audience by making TV shows about music they love. This has been a truism for PBS for many a pledge-drive season now, so it’s no surprise the network would air a show like last night’s American Experience Masters, Troubadours, about the ’70s folk-rock scene in Los Angeles. It’s much more [...]

+Uncategorized | 330 days ago

Top Chef Watch: Family Style

By James Poniewozik

Quick spoilers for last night’s Top Chef coming up: So before you all decide that I’m a heartless bastard, let me stipulate that last night’s “Give Me Your Huddled Masses” episode of Top Chef touched me in all the ways it intended to. I did indeed get verklempt at Michael’s memory of his grandmother’s gnocchi [...]

+Uncategorized | 330 days ago

Idol Watch: My Top Five Women (Or So)

By James Poniewozik

It was American Idol‘s turn to show off its dozen female semifinalists last night, and the ladies were… shiny. Arrayed in a sea of glitter and riding waves of curls (among men and women alike, this seems to be the Season of Hair on Idol), the women tried to sing their way into America’s top [...]

+Uncategorized | 331 days ago

The Good Wife Watch: Forget It, Alicia. It's China.

By James Poniewozik

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife coming up:

+331 days ago

Top Chef Masters Tweaks the Recipe

By James Poniewozik

I am not one to complain about more Top Chef in any form. I love the original, I liked Top Chef Masters, I even—in theory if not in first-season practice—liked Top Chef Just Desserts. But while I eventually grew used to the format of Top Chef Masters, I wished from the beginning that it could [...]

+News Media | 331 days ago

The Two Charlie Sheens

By James Poniewozik

Yesterday and very early this morning, Charlie Sheen continued not going away. The sitcom star / cautionary tale / performance artist started a Twitter account yesterday afternoon; as of this writing, he’s pushing 800,000 followers. And to listen to Sheen, you’ve just got to know that he take the word “followers” literally; that steadily rising [...]

+Uncategorized | 331 days ago

The Morning After: The Best Show That I Wasn't Watching

By James Poniewozik

I was eager for NBC’s Parenthood when it debuted last season, but I found that it settled into a temperate zone: good and well-performed enough to be unobjectionable, but not absorbing enough that I felt compelled to keep up with it. Critic-triage took hold and I lost the thread of the show going into the [...]

+Uncategorized | 332 days ago

Idol Watch: My Top Five Guys (Or So)

By James Poniewozik

American Idol entered the semifinals last night, as the twelve remaining guys battled for five (non-wild-card) spots in the final and the new judging panel strutted its stuff for a primetime voting audience for the first time this season. After the jump, my top five picks (based only on last night’s performances) and one wild [...]

+Uncategorized | 332 days ago

House Watch: Everybody Lies!

By James Poniewozik

Over at sister blog Healthland, TIME’s John Cloud has returned to the House Watch, where he finds the medical procedural turning to an old favorite theme: lies, and the patients who tell them: The episode opens with a man named Bert scrubbing a floor drenched in blood. His wife calls, and he tells the show’s [...]

+332 days ago

ABC Announces DWTS Cast

By James Poniewozik

At this point, you could pretty much do the cast diagram of a typical Dancing With the Stars season yourself: some current/former athletes, a kids’ star, an old peoples’ star, some reality-show personalities, a where-are-they-now star, a minor pop/country singer or two—plus, in recent years, a wild card, like a controversial political figure or controversial [...]

+News Media | 332 days ago

Charlie Sheen Has a Friend in Piers

By James Poniewozik

After an absence from TV interviews of several hours, Charlie Sheen went on CNN last night to favor Piers Morgan with a last-minute, live hourlong interview. And if you were concerned that Morgan would do the same kind of softball interviews that his predecessor Larry King did, this one proved you wrong. Piers Morgan does [...]

+Uncategorized | 332 days ago

The Morning After: Discomfort Food

By James Poniewozik

Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations returned on Travel Channel last night with a moving, sometimes discomfiting visit to post-earthquake Haiti. I’ve always liked No Reservations, not just for Bourdain’s foulmouthed sense of humor but because it approaches food and travel as more than entertainments. It starts from the premise that what people eat is an expression [...]