TV amp; Movies Reviews

Meet Ramy Hassan. He’s 27 years old and lives in Rutherford, New Jersey, with his parents and his younger sister; he was going to get a place of his own, but then the start-up he worked at went belly-up. Now he schleps for his uncle in New York’s diamond district …

“Your mother may be the greatest mother in the world,” Sam Fox’s brother Marion (Kevin Pollak) tells her youngest daughter midway through the new season of FX’s Better Things (Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET). “She’s crazy and a complete pain in the ass and annoying, but she loves you and …

TNT’s I Am the Night feels like a show from another time, and not because the mystery limited series takes place in 1965 Los Angeles. Rather, it seems a throwback to five years ago, when the television business was racing to copy the success of True Detective Season One with …

Did you ever think you could beSpider-Man? This gorgeous take on the Marvel superhero knows you can — that everyone can. The great power always comes by accident, that famous spider-bite origin story; it’s what you do with that power, of course, that really counts. It’s a hard lesson for …

When it debuted earlier this year, I compared Starz’s Counterpart simultaneouslyto The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Fringe and The Parent Trap. Such was the unlikely yet appealing combination of genres and tones used to tell the story of Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons), a meek government bureaucrat who …

That dude could paint! There are biopics of artists that don’t ask more of an audience than that simple reaction. Not so with Julian Schnabel’s extraordinary At Eternity’s Gate, which features a monumental, career-best performance from Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh. It’s not that Schnabel doesn’t glory in the …

One of the key characteristics that distinguished Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men from its prestige-drama peers was that it was serialized, but focused first and foremost on making each episode its own beautiful, handcrafted work of art. Instead of a novel for television, it was a short-story collection set in the …

As he proved with Bridesmaids, Spy and The Heat, director Paul Feig knows how to bring out the scrappy best in actresses (he’s a modern-day George Cukor). And in A Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively shine as they rarely have before. True, the script, adapted by Jessica Sharzer …

In its sense of poisoned family bloodlines, of the everyday invaded by unspeakable evil, of bonechilling terror you won’t be able to shake, Hereditary is a new horror landmark that puts a unique face on things that go bump in the night. To be clear, this award-caliber debut feature from …

It’s doubtful that all the comic-book noise at the multiplex is making you long for Chekhov, but hey: Here’s the Russian playwright anyway! And unlike Sidney Lumet’s misbegotten 1968 film version of The Seagull, this new take on the 1896 theatrical milestone gets the casting right; ditto the tone of …