Linda Holmes

The Equalizer, starring Denzel Washington in the kind of role (the "Sad Jedi," as our own Chris Klimek put it in his terrific review) that Liam Neeson has been specializing in for several years, hit theaters last weekend. It made a lot of money, and that got us ...

The bummer about Bad Judge, a comedy premiering Thursday night on NBC, is that Kate Walsh is funny. There's a particular moment when she decides to sing something she's just said, and just in that brief moment, she's legitimately funny.

But boy, she is stuck in a stinker here, a ...

We've been over this point before: particularly with comedy, it can be hard to tell from a pilot what the show is going to be like. But when you've seen a few, you can sometimes tell the difference between fundamentally misbegotten projects, like the ABC romantic comedy Manhattan Love Story, ...

Netflix has thus far found its highest-profile successes in original content by competing with award-ready premium television with Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards.

But there's more to running a network than winning awards, and the reminder of that came this morning with an announcement that Netflix ...

One of the luxuries of cultural abundance is the wonderful freedom of saying, "I could wait and see, but I don't have any reason to wait and see, because life is short, good things are plentiful, and your pilot makes me feel like I have food poisoning."

CBS has constructed ...

The pilot of the ABC show Selfie, starring Karen Gillan and John Cho in a Pygmalion update built on the notion that being obsessed with Twitter is the new Flawed But Fixable Personality Problem, is only about 22 minutes long — a little less. Given that pilots always have to ...

Please understand that this post contains information about the plot of Gone Girl that has the capacity to rob it of many of its best and most delicious surprises for anyone not already aware of them. It's most appropriate for people who have already either read the book or seen ...

At the opening of Gone Girl, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is literally a man on the street. Standing by his trashcans in the half-light of an early morning at his gorgeous Missouri home in a T-shirt and sweatpants, he is what might be mistaken for "comfortable," but he is painfully, ...

Our pal Chris Klimek has a fine review of the film The Equalizer, in which Denzel Washington plays a man who gets revenge on all manner of bad guys, and maybe annoying people, and maybe just other people? Anyway, it seems inevitable that if the movie comes back, ...

When we learned that our treasured friends Barrie Hardymon and Margaret "Hulahoop" Willison (thus named for her actual middle initial, H, as well as her whimsical and irresistible delightfulness) were both going to be in town when we taped this episode, there was only one thing to do: fire Stephen.

Writer Kara Brown recently reacted to an L.A. Times story about cornrows with one simple thought: "Friends, readers, ladyfolk, I believe we are being trolled."

She was referring not just to the cornrows piece — which went on and on about cornrows without mentioning a single black woman, ...

Bill Simmons, the ESPN commentator whose Twitter bio reads in part "Grantland boss + columnist, @30for30 co-creator, NBA Countdown co-host, BS Report host," will not be doing most of those jobs for three weeks after using the last of them — host of the podcast The BS Report — ...

Steve Almond's blistering book Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto is exactly what it advertises itself to be: an exasperated, frustrated, wide-ranging argument that the time has come to abandon football — particularly but not exclusively the NFL — as a sport built on violence, racism, economic exploitation of poor ...

"When brothers start getting a little money, stuff starts getting a little weird."

That's one of the opening lines of the pilot of ABC's Black-ish, which follows the Johnson family, led by ad executive Andre (Anthony Anderson, whose line that is) and doctor Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), who live with ...

In the wake of the premiere of Fox's Red Band Society, there's been lots of talk — not unreasonably — about how it's just The Fault In Our Stars crossed with Glee, which it sort of is, and about how it's just a variation on what I've heard called "sick ...

The problem with being slow on the draw with your fall TV picks is that there aren't so many recommend-able new shows that you can make an entire B-team out of them. Yesterday's post from NPR's Eric Deggans named most of the shows I would have named on ...

I saw Shonda Rhimes at a panel presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour this summer where she helped introduce How to Get Away with Murder, the new ABC drama she helps produce but did not create. I found her pleasantly (and a little amusingly) transparent in not loving ...

Ordinariness is a quality in movies that likely bothers critics and enthusiasts more than it does other people. The more films you see, the more the enemy becomes not just poor quality but familiarity, simply because even an inoffensive cliche becomes a cinematic earworm after a while — something that ...

We've had a lively summer on PCHH, full of live events and quizzes and special guests and even Stephen hosting episodes (!) (kidding!), but this week, we've got our pal Bob Mondello in the studio for some good old-fashioned movie and TV chatter.

Bob and I recently returned from the ...

When Fox presented its new drama Red Band Society to critics over the summer, creator Margaret Nagle stressed that it was not a derivative of any particular story of sick teenagers that has perhaps permeated the culture in the last five years. Instead, it was inspired by the ...