+Review Movies | 211 days ago

Larry Crowne: Tom Hanks's Unemployment for Beginners

By Mary Pols
Universal Studios

Losing your job ain’t so bad when you get to date Julia Roberts

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 211 days ago

Test Pilot: Up All Night

By James Poniewozik

Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, [...]

+Review Movies | 212 days ago

The New Transformers: Turn On the Dark

By Richard Corliss
Everett

For good or ill, director Michael Bay is the soul of a new machine, the poet of post-human cinema, the CEO of Hollywood’s military-entertainment complex

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 212 days ago

Test Pilot: Ringer

By James Poniewozik

Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, [...]

+Video Games | 213 days ago

Violent Video Games: The Top 8 Big Money Franchises

By TIME Staff
05ViolentVideoGames_Top8BigMoneyFranchises

In observance of the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision to treat video games to the same First Amendment protection as art, music, and movies, here’s a look at some of the biggest names in violent game franchises

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 213 days ago

Test Pilot: 2 Broke Girls

By James Poniewozik

Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 214 days ago

Programming Note

By James Poniewozik

I’m going to be on vacation for the next week, traversing the wilds of southeast Michigan and, with any luck, having at least one sandwich at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. Keep checking this space, though: there may be a guest post or two, and I’ve set up Robo-James—taking a break from his burgeoning career in [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 214 days ago

ABC Announces Its Fall Premiere Dates

By James Poniewozik

Following Fox and The CW, ABC today announced its rollout schedule for its new and returning fall shows. While the networks have experimented in recent years with staggered fall schedules to avoid shows getting lost in a pileup of premieres, most of ABC’s new shows will debut traditionally, in late September—the exceptions being the sitcom [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 214 days ago

End of a Cop Show Era? Goodbye to Law & Order: Criminal Intent

By James Poniewozik

I’m not a fan of phony eulogies, and so I will confess up front that I was not a huge fan of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which just ended its run on USA. It’s partly that I could never sign on to its central selling point, the performance of Vincent D’Onofrio as Goren, who [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 214 days ago

The Morning After: Faerie Tale

By James Poniewozik

HBO’s True Blood returned last night with a season four premiere that expanded further on the show’s sexy-magic Southern gothic world: a little witchcraft, a little more vampire politics and a visit with Sookie to a Faerie world/prison that looked a bit like the world’s cheesiest gallery opening party. True Blood lost me after its [...]

+Remembrance | 216 days ago

Peter Falk: The One-Eyed Man Was King

By Richard Corliss
Peter Falk

Best known as TV’s wily, shambling Lt. Columbo, Falk was also a working-class movie hero, in a half-century career playing comic gangsters, harried husbands and one great granddad

+Review Movies | 217 days ago

Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher: What's Her Motivation?

By Mary Pols
Gemma LaMana / Columbia Pictures

The saggy premise of her new comedy could use some augmentation

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Tuned In+Remembrance | 217 days ago

Peter Falk Dies at 83

By James Poniewozik

Actor Peter Falk reportedly died last night at age 83, at his home in Beverly Hills. According to his daughter, reports USA Today, Falk had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. As an actor, Falk was a performer who was more than he at first seemed: he had a famously raspy, tough-guy manner of [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 217 days ago

Louie Watch: Pregnant Pause

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s Louie below: Since I’m stepping back from weekly Watches on the blog, I don’t expect to be writing about Louie every week, though I’ll certainly be watching. But because I visited the set for the shooting of “Pregnant,” because it gives some suggestions as to the direction of the second season, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 217 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: From Oprah to Olbermann

By James Poniewozik

My column in the dead-tree issue of TIME out today looks at the return of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, not so much from a review perspective but looking at Olbermann as the latest example of a media star leveraging his or her brand. Oprah launched the OWN channel, Glenn Beck is turning his show into [...]

+Review Movies | 218 days ago

Cars 2: A Pixar Fantasy That Runs Out of Gas

By Mary Pols
Disney / Pixar

In Pixar’s latest, an unlikely friendship runs out of gas

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 218 days ago

Fox Announces Fall Premiere Dates

By James Poniewozik

This morning Fox network announced its fall schedule, which will bring two high-expectations series, The X Factor and Terra Nova, to air in September along with the sitcom New Girl. Animated comedy Allen Gregory and live-humans comedy I Hate My Teenage Daughter will be along later in the fall; the rest of Fox’s new shows [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 218 days ago

Louis CK Interview, Part 2: Money and Mortality

By James Poniewozik

FX’s Louie, the dark-comic vision of Louis CK, returns for a second season tonight. (Also, the season-one DVD just came out; see above for a probably-NSFW deleted scene.) My feature on the comedian and the new season is in this week’s TIME magazine, and part one of the (lightly edited) transcript of our interview went [...]