Linda Holmes

A genre film – one about superheroes, for instance – holds certain variables constant and allows others to change. The visual style can move, the dialogue style can move, and the force to be battled can move: what fans of Buffy The Vampire Slayer call the "Big Bad."

But in ...

[WARNING: If you haven't seen the series finale of How I Met Your Mother, don't watch it. Just kidding! Sort of. This piece, at any rate, contains plot details from that finale.]

When How I Met Your Mother premiered in the fall of 2005, it was sandwiched between The King ...

[What follows is a personal reflection. Please indulge me.]

I felt a little strange when I learned that NBC Universal, which purchased the recap site Television Without Pity in 2007, was closing it on April 4. On the one hand, I quit in 2008, so it's been years since I ...

In the first-ever episode of the Australian series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, the central figure, Phryne Fisher, has to explain to her young, extremely Catholic new maid Dot what exactly is in the round, plastic case that Dot is holding in her hands. "Family planning," she says casually.

Phryne (pronounced ...

Archie Panjabi is part of the cast of CBS's The Good Wife, which has spent much of this week hearing an earful about a major plot development on last Sunday's episode. (They discuss her feelings about the reaction, but do not specify what the development was.)

But on Saturday's Weekend ...

The romantic comedy-drama is not dead; it's just being platformed.

I saw The Lunchbox, the first feature from director Ritesh Batra, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of last year. Starring Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur, it takes as its jumping-off point the dabbawalas of Mumbai, guys on ...

There's no one better to — as Stephen terms it — put the Y in YA than our youngest regular contributor, Code Switch's Kat Chow. So Kat sits in for our discussion this week of Divergent, which is not at all The Hunger Games, but ... sort of is. We ...

One of my old pals used to come walking into a room at the end of a long day, sigh, look around, and say, "Tell me two things good." They could be big things, small things, anything — he had to hear two things, and they had to be good ...

Divergent, the new film starring Shailene Woodley based on the popular YA novels by Veronica Roth, describes a dystopian future in which everyone belongs to one of five "factions": Erudite (cold-blooded intellectuals), Amity (hippie farmers), Abnegation (plain-dress public servants), Candor (people who tell the truth all the time) (?), and ...

[CAUTION: Do not, under any circumstances, read any farther unless you want to know what happened on Sunday night's The Good Wife. Do not say you were not warned.]

My friend Maureen Ryan has distinguished at times between a show being "not good" and a show being "not ...

On this week's episode, our pal Gene Demby is with us for a discussion of the recent Between Two Ferns episode in which the President of the United States chatted about the Hangover movies. What does this kind of appearance accomplish? What is the meaning of "keeping it ...

Say this to yourself: "I'd like a grande skim Oprah."

Let it roll off your tongue. Let it echo in your head. Let it burn itself into your brain. Really feel it.

On Wednesday, Starbucks announced that, in partnership with Oprah Winfrey, it had developed Oprah Chai Tea, which will ...

Many of the more interesting shows on television have their little peculiarities: Community has Dan Harmon going on for thousands of words at a time about his feelings, Game of Thrones has fretting over the pace of the show versus the books, and Mad Men has creator Matthew ...

Shark Tank is a startlingly popular Friday-night show where people who have invented various strange things (and sometimes cool things) bring them to a group of rich people and beg for an investment. Some of the products make sense, some are sort of genius, and some are ... well, some ...

A while ago, we devoted a segment to the matter of profanity, and now, as summer follows spring and spring (supposedly) follows winter, we are moving on to the issue of nudity. When is it decorative? When is it exploitation? And how would they see all of this ...

We don't know a whole lot about the upcoming season of Orange Is The New Black, but Netflix put out three images today that might give you something to at least chew on. It certainly appears that we'll be picking up where we left off, in a very immediate sense. ...

Movie trailers have changed a lot, and if you show a teenager now a trailer from (for instance) 1997, it will seem almost comedically anachronistic and corny.

But this is how, for many years, we got excited about the movies. And these growly narrations — which were recently the subject ...

Every reality show is an entirely true story.

It is not the story that it claims to be — the story of two tribes building a new civilization, the story of America's search for its next superstar — but it is a true story nevertheless. It is, or at least ...

[This piece contains a detailed discussion of Sunday night's True Detective finale. If you haven't seen it and you plan to see it and you don't want to know what happens, stop reading.]

[Seriously, information ahoy.]

Spoiler alert: The dirty-faced, crazy-talking, disheveled impoverished guy did it.

Because we are talking ...