Jan 10 2025
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Books, Movies, Television

The Entertainment Forecast

Jan. 10 – Jan. 16

A ‘Star Wars’ marathon, the worm turns for P. Diddy & bugs come to ‘Life’

All times Eastern.

FRIDAY, Jan. 10
Goosebumps: The Vanishing
New season begins tonight of the scarifying anthology series based on books by R.L. Stein and starring David Schwimmer, Ana Ortiz and more (Hulu).

SATURDAY, Jan. 11
Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story
Knock knock! Who’s there? Terror, you dope! Dascha Polanco from Orange is the New Black stars in this true-story thriller about a woman who makes a life-or-death decision to protect her family when robbers break into the home (Lifetime).

Star Wars Movie Marathon
Spend a day with Star Wars and Rouge One: A Star Wars Story, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (starts 11:30 a.m., TBS).

SUNDAY, Jan. 12
Rogue Heroes
Season two takes wing of this military drama about the British Army’s Special Air Forces in World War II. Starring Connor Swindells, Jack O’Connell and Gwilyn Lee (MGM+).

MONDAY, Jan. 13
Without Arrows
Follow the journey of a traditional “grass dancer” from Philadelphia who embraces his cultural roots as a Lakota and returns to the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota (10 p.m., PBS).

Death By Fame
New season of the series probing the dark undersides of Hollywood murder and celebrity misfortune (9 p.m., ID).

TUESDAY, Jan. 14
Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy
What did Diddy do? Find out the dark forces, detours and influences that shaped the once-successful rapper and music mogul (above) into the jailed man now charged with underage sex trafficking and racketeering in this 90-minute documentary with interviews from people who know him, knew him and now reveal his troubling past (Peacock).

Journey to America
Newt and Callista Gingrich narrate this documentary about individuals who’ve pursued the American dream and contributed to the fabric of its society (10 p.m., PBS).

The Curious Case of…
Real-life scandals suggest that truth is far more chilling than fiction (Max).

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 15
A Real Bug’s Life
Meet more tiny heroes with huge dramas in season two about the weird, wild and wonderful world of insects, narrated by Awkwafina (Disney+),

An Update on Our Family
Explore the symbiotic world of vlogging where families share a steady stream of lifestyle videos on their social media channels and subscribers give them money to continue. Are they making themselves too public? (Max).

THURSDAY, Jan. 16
Long Bright River
Amanda Seyfried stars in new suspense series as a Philly cop investigating a series of murders—and discovering that her own past may become part of a case (Peacock).

Harley Quinn
Kaley Cuoco returns the voice of the female superhero in this new season of this adult-oriented animated series (above) based on DC Comics characters (Max).

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Acclaimed for his gritty, sometimes unflinching black-and-white pictures of New York street life in the 1930s and ‘40s, from slums to cops and crime victims, the photographer known as Weegee gets a thorough examination in Weegee: Society of the Spectacle (Thames & Hudson). Later, in Hollywood, he became a photo “trickster” and a chronicler of the high life. Find out the two sides of this fascinating man who saw the world—the highs and the lows, the bad and the good—through his camera.

Monkey see, monkey do—and monkey make monkeyshines, as you’ll find out in Monkey Tales from Around the World (McFarland), a simian-centric compendium of all the ways apes, chimps and others from our closet genetic kin have enriched our folklore and pop culture as jesters, troublemakers or even heroes…and what they teach us about being human.

Jan 08 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Better Man”

Musical biopic puts a marvelous simian spin on Robbie Williams’ pop-stardom monkeyshines

Better Man
Starring Robbie Williams/Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton & Rachel Banno
Directed by Michael Gracey
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Jan. 10

I’ll venture that you’ve never seen anything like this swinging, soaring, stirring music biopic about British pop star Robbie Williams. Because the star of the show is a monkey.

Throughout the film, Williams is portrayed as a chimpanzee, meant to represent the singer as he sees himself, “unevolved” and immature. “I’m ugly, stupid and untalented,” is young Robbie’s stinging self-assessment. Though what we hear is Williams’ own singing and speaking voice, British actor Jonno Davies portrays him—via some amazingly tactile high-tech motion-capture technology—as the monkey. It’s like one of the primates from Planet of the Apes became a Brit-pop singing star.

When he’s 16, Williams joins the startup “boy band” Take That—in the vein of Boys II Men or Backstreet Boys—that would notch nearly 30 Top 40 hits, a dozen of which went to No. 1 on the British charts. The movie is filled with music, often as springboards for movie-musical sequences, like when the group hits the streets for an poppin’ and boppin’ take of the song “Rock DJ.”      

It’s a bold choice to portray your movie’s star as a simian, surrounded by ordinary people who don’t seem to notice anything unusual. But it allows for some wildly provocative, surprisingly evocative moments as director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) depicts just how maladjusted Williams feels, from growing up in working-class London to reaching the top of the pops as self-loathing singing star. The visual landscape is constantly moving and fluid, from “reality” to sweeping sequences of fantasy. When Williams crashes his car into a frozen lake, he’s swarmed by fans and paparazzi, pulling him deeper under. After he meets a cute girl at a party, the entire scene becomes a dazzling dance number orchestrated to the 1999 hit “She’s the One.” (And hey, this monkey’s got some smoooooth Fred Astaire moves!) When Williams is singing on stage and peers out into the audience, he sees troubling versions of himself, apes glaring back at him in scorn and disapproval. At one point, he dives into the crowd and fights them.

British actor Steve Pemberton plays Williams’ dad, an unabashed fan of classic crooners who abandoned his family to chase his own dreams of stardom. Rachel Banno is Nicole Appleton, the British pop star for whom Williams falls, hard, but eventually loses to another singing star, Liam Gallagher (Leo Harvey-Ellege) of Oasis. Alison Steadman (who played Mrs. Bennet in the mini-series Pride and Prejudice) is Robbie’s beloved grandmother, who gave him affection and support while munching on bags of crisps in front of the telly.

“I don’t want to be a nobody,” a sorrowful young Robbie tells his gram, recalling something hurtful and lingering that his father once told him. Robbie instead wants to be something that he would later express in his song “Better Man.”

That song, of course, becomes the title and the theme of this marvel of a movie, in which a CGI-motion-capture ape man makes us feel all kinds of human empathy for the real person he represents in some daringly creative cinematic monkeyshines.

—Neil Pond

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Jan 03 2025
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Books, Movies, Pop Culture, Television

The Entertainment Forecast

Jan. 3 – Jan. 9

A ‘Nashville’ binge, movie awards season begins & Tim Allen returns to sitcom-ville

Tim Allen & Kat Dennings star in ‘Shifting Gears.’

All times Eastern.

FRIDAY, Jan. 3
Grammy Greats: The Most Memorable Moments
Highlights from music’s biggest night over the years, featuring Dua Lipa, Luke Combs, LL Cool J, Jennifer Hudson, Joni Mitchell, Elton John, Ricky Martin and many more (9 p.m., CBS).

Ru-Paul’s Drag Race
Season 17 of the award-winning reality series begins tonight with 14 new queens competing for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar and a cash prize of $200,000. Guest judges include Sandra Bernard, Adam Lambert, Whitney Cummings and Tracee Ellis Ross (8 p.m,, MTV).

SATURDAY, Jan. 4
Extraordinary World with Jeff Corwin
New Saturday-morning series spotlights everyday people making extraordinary impact on the world through animal advocacy, wildlife conservation, youth empowerment and helping fight food insecurity (9 a.m., CBS).

Vanished Out of Sight
No, it’s not about Medicare or Social Security or your 401-K savings. This lurid made-for-Lifetime drama is about a blind woman (Annalise Basso) searching for his missing six-year- old daughter. It’s like she just vanished, out of sight! (8 p.m., Lifetime).

SUNDAY, Jan. 5
Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches
Season two begins tonight of the modern-day vampire saga starring Alexandra Daddario (above), Jack Huston, Harry Hamlin and Tongayii Chirisa (AMC+ and AMC).

The Golden Globes
Emilia Perez and The Bear lead the nominees for tonight’s 82nd annual presentation, hosted by comedian Nikki Glaser, awarding the best in TV and movies, and kicking off movies-awards season ahead of the Oscars (8 p.m., CBS).

MONDAY, Jan. 6
Kids Baking Championship
Most moms don’t really want their kids getting the way in the kitchen, but these tater tots are no strangers to pots ‘n’ pans. The new season features a field of new kid chefs taking on creative food challenges, this time with “animal” themes (8 p.m., Food Network).

Minted
If you don’t know your NFT (non-fungible tokens) from your NDAs, check out this inside look at how tech transformed the traditional art world, for better and worse (10 p.m., PBS)

TUESDAY, Jan. 7
A Nashville Marathon
Watch every episode of the hit 2012-2019 music drama (above) starring Connie Britton, Hayden Panettiere, Charles Eston and Clare Bowen in a country music-centric primetime soap drama (10 a.m., AXS TV).

Black Box Diaries
Exposing the desperately outdated judicial system in Japan, this riveting documentary follows the director, as the victim of a sexual assault, and her attempts to prosecute her high-profile offender. It became a landmark court case and a book (Paramount+).

Wildcard Kitchen
All-star chefs play late-night poker, where the luck of the draw determines what dishes they’ll cook, and how much time they’ll have to do it (9 p.m., Food Network).  

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 8
Shifting Gears
Tim Allen returns to primetime with this new network comedy series as the widowed owner of a classic car restoration shop, and Kat Dennings as his estranged daughter (8 p.m., ABC).

Murder Under the Friday Night Lights
Go deep, as they say in football, for the previously untold story of New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez and his connection to a pair of high school teammates who became murderers (9 p.m., ID).

THURSDAY, Jan. 9
On Call
New police drama about a rookie (Brandon Larracuente) and a veteran officer (Troian Bellisario) protecting their community in California (Prime).

Hollywood Squares
Drew Barrymore takes the iconic center square in the new season of the re-invented classic game show, hosted by Nate Burleson of CBS Mornings (8 p.m., CBS).

READ ALL ABOUT IT

During the 1960s, comics evolved from pulpy pastimes to more refined, sophisticated art, not just in America but all over the world. Comics: 1964-2024 (Thames & Hudson) is a vibrantly illustrated look at the growth and creative development of the illustrated artform across the previous six decades, after Blondie, Dick Tracy or Beetle Bailey had become yesterday’s news and other bolder, more adventurous comics entered the pop-culture mainstream.

What does one of the most world-famous palaces of all time look like, up close? Well, you can find out in Versailles From the Sky (Thames & Hudson), a collection of 200 color pics with rarely seen views (including some striking aerials by drone cameras) at the sumptuous  French home and the surrounding grounds commissioned in the early 1600s by King Louis XIV. It’s an international architectural tour at your fingertips!

The legendary Dick Van Dkye, now 99, has his own Little Golden Book! Re-live his life and career highlights (from childhood, thru his years serving in the military, to Mary Poppins! Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! and The Dick Van Dyke Show!), all warmly illustrated in Dick Van Dyke: A Little Golden Book Biography (Penguin/Random House) by Christy Webster.

Dec 27 2024
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Humor, Movies, Music, Pop Culture, Television

The Entertainment Forecast

Dec. 27 – Jan. 2

‘Pirates’ ahoy, funny videos, Nashville’s big bash & rockers ring in the new year!

All times Eastern.

FRIDAY, Dec. 27
Your Fault
Based on the Culpable book trilogy by Mercedes Ron, this Spanish-language streaming flick stars Nicole Wallace and Gabriel Guevara in the continuing tale of young love and those trying to destroy it, including an ex-girlfriend seeking revenge (Prime Video).

The Greatest Home Videos: Holiday Edition
Year-end Christmas fun, cute pets and more holiday hijinks, hosted by Cedric the Entertainer, below (8 p.m., CBS).

SATURDAY, Dec. 28
Pirates of the Caribbean Marathon
Set sail with Johnny Depp and the rest of the high-seas scallywags for back-to-back airings of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and The Curse of the Black Pearl (3 p.m., TNT).

SUNDAY, Dec. 29
1923: A Yellowstone Origin Story
Watch Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in a double feature of episodes of the Yellowstone spinoff-sequel (8 p.m., Paramount).

MONDAY, Dec. 30
Darby and Joan
Season two begins tonight of the Aussie drama about a retired detective (Bryan Brown) and widowed nurse (Gretchen Scacci) in Queensland (Acorn TV).

Who I Am Not
Documentary about a South Africa beauty queen dealing with the discovery that she’s nonbinary. It’s a heart-wrenching look at a fight for acceptance in a world that’s wired differently (10 p.m., PBS).

TUESDAY, Dec. 31
Nashville’s Big Bash
Host Keith Urban rings in the new year with Kane Brown, Jelly Roll, Lainey Wilson, Eric Church, Post Malone and other top stars in live performances from downtown Music City (8 p.m., CBS).

NYE Concert Marathon
Celebrate all day with some rocking concert performances from Fleetwood Mac, Queen, AC/DC (above), Bon Jovi, ZZ Top, Blondie, Journey, Willie Nelson and Sammy Hagar (8 a.m., TBS).

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 1
Luther: Never Too Much
Learn about the smooth soulful singer Luther Vandross, from his formative years in Harlem through his days on Sesame Street, before becoming the master of the love song (8 p.m., CNN).

THURSDAY, Jan. 2
Holiday Baking Championship
Tired of cooking after the holidays? Then sit back watch other people as they rise to the challenges of host Jesse Palmer (8 p.m., Food Network).

Lockerbie: A Search for the Truth
What caused Pan Am Flight 103 to explode over a Scottish town in 1988, killing 259 passengers and crew. Colin Firth and Catherine McCormick star in this dramatization of the search for answers, and the truth (Peacock).

Dec 23 2024
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Nosferatu”

New remake of the original vampire flick stirs up chills anew.

Nosferatu
Starring Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult & Willem Dafoe
Directed by Robert Eggers
Rated R

In theaters Wednesday, Dec. 25

A beautiful bride becomes a ravenous obsession for a monstrous vampire in this spectacularly spooky spin on an old, oft-told tale.

How old, and how oft-told? Well, the original Nosferatu was a silent movie back in 1922, long regarded the first vampire film. It was based on the novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, from the late 1800s. That story, and that movie, are both lauded as groundbreaking masterpieces, launching multitudes of other movie offshoots over the next century. Now this new, supremely crafted creepshow stirs up the terrifying roots of the classic story with chills anew, pouring on a moody megadose of gloomy Gothic doom, dark red blood and gasp-y (sometimes ghastly) arousal to offset all your cozy holiday feelings of comfort and joy.

Lily-Rose Depp (yep, Johnny’ Depp’s model-turned-actress daughter) is Ellen, the young newlywed suffering from unsettling nightmares and violent seizures. Her husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is a London real estate agent sent to faraway central Europe to arrange for a new home for the mysterious—and chilling—Count Orlock. (Though it’s never mentioned by name, a glimpse at an upside-down map notes the region as “Transylvania.”) And guess where Orlock wants to relocate? Yep, in London, just down the street from Ellen and Thomas.

Is Ellen sick with worry for her traveling husband? Or maybe distempered with melancholy, perhaps even possessed? Her friends (The Crown’s Emma Corwin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are concerned, puzzled, and unsettled by her troubling spells. During Thomas’ absence, they summon the local doctor (Ralph Michael Ineson), who eventually calls on a scholarly professor of all things ancient and occult-y (Willem Dafoe, perfectly cast).

Soon enough, the prof gets a pungent whiff of what’s up. Turns out the count (Bill Skarsgård) is a vampire with an appetite for blood—and a beyond-the-grave crush on Ellen. But by then, the bodies are piling up, rats have infested the town, the count has arrived after a fateful shipboard journey, and some little girls discover, tragically, that imaginary monsters aren’t so imaginary.

Director Robert Eggers is a maestro of malevolence, as he demonstrated in his previous films The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman. He confidently paints this tale with all kinds of disturbia and draws out—sometimes graphically—the mythos of sexuality that’s often been sublimated in vampire stories. Ellen’s writhing agonies are close to ecstasies as Orlock seduces her from afar, causing blood-spurting, eyeball-bulging contortions—and orgasmic sighs. As different characters say throughout the film, “He is coming!” Uh, well, you could put it that way.  


Willem Dafoe is a vampire hunter.

The movie also explores the nature of evil in a world of yore where demons and curses and fairytales are real, science and religion powerless against unholy darkness, and death a fact of life. Orlock, who turns out to be the eternally unquenchable demon Nosferatu, is quite literally death itself. Can the “plague” he brings to London be stopped? Not just with a stake—or pickaxe—through the heart, I’m afraid.

Let’s talk a minute about actor Bill Skarsgård. He’s best known for playing another demonic character, the killer clown in two It horror flicks. Here’s he’s truly unrecognizable under layers of facial prosthetics and slinking around like a half-decomposed corpse. Cloaked in shadow for most of the movie, he’s a hideously ossified incubus, a profane beast for the ages. He is indeed the stuff of nightmares.

And so is this movie, now leading the pack as the best—and most lavishly unnerving—scary movie of the year. It’s a devilishly potent, magnificently orchestrated scare fest that’s intentionally unsettling, but also strangely comforting. Because it’s a dark, delicious reassurance that as long as Robert Eggers is making movies, horror is in good hands.

—Neil Pond

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Dec 22 2024
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “A Complete Unknown”

Timothée Chalamet channels Bob Dylan in tune-filled biopic about the young troubadour.

A Complete Unknown
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro
Directed by James Mangold
Rated R

In theaters Wednesday, Dec. 25

He hitchhiked a ride, in the back of a station wagon, into New York City in 1961—as a complete unknown—with dreams of becoming a successful singer/songwriter. That’s how this vibrant biopic of Bob Dylan begins, setting up its intoxicating whirl through the turbulent first half of the decade as the former Robert Zimmerman becomes the new “youthful” voice and face of folk music, setting the foundation for all that would follow.

And just this time last year, Timothée Chalamet was singing a different tune, as the spry young chocolatier Willy Wonka. Now he’s kicked it up a few notches and dug down deeper, giving a much more matured, grounded and finely nuanced performance as the enigmatic, petulant, creatively restless and intriguingly shape-shifting writer of such classics as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changing,” “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” He sings like Dylan, talks like Dylan, looks like Dylan and even nails Dylan’s tics and mannerisms. I’ll let true Bob Dylan scholars weigh in on the deep-dish accuracy, but to me, it sure feels like Chalamet could well be in the year-end Oscars race.

The movie introduces us to other real-life characters in Dylan’s early orbit. There’s banjo-playing elder statesman Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and the legendary Woody “This Land is Your Land” Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), twin pillars of era’s folk scene. Monica Barbaro, from NBC’s Chicago franchise (Chicago Justice and Chicago P.D.), brings fire, spice and ice as folksinger Joan Baez; her complicated and testy relationship with Dylan—she calls him an “asshole,” he disses her songwriting as something like “an oil painting at a dentist’s office”—becomes one leg of a romantic triangle with Bob and New York artist Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning). Ozark’s Charlie Tahan is Al Kooper—who’d later go on to found Blood, Sweat & Tears—as he scoots behind the Columbia studio’s Hammond B3 for a Dylan session and lays down the distinctive organ intro for “Like a Rolling Stone”  (a line from which the movie takes its title). And there’s country hitmaker Johnny Cash (Robert Holbrook), who becomes a pen pal and idol to young “Bobbie.”

Director James Mangold, whose wide-ranging movie and TV work also includes Walk the Line (2005), the Oscar-nominated biopic about Johnny Cash and wife June Carter, creates an authentic, almost encyclopedic milieu of the times, from music-makers in hippie-dippy clothes and smoky Greenwich Village coffeehouses to brow-creasing worries about Communists lurking everywhere, nuclear Armageddon and race riots in the aftermath of the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. It shows how folk music became instrumental in the social activism of its times, its songs confronting and colliding with politics to create seismic pop-culture shifts and upheaval.

A Complete Unknown is really all about Dylan, how he became interwoven into the larger social fabric of the ‘60s, and how the success he wanted so badly also brought him a suffocating level of acclaim that he didn’t. And it’s about how he continually worked to create and re-create himself, twisting and retooling his musical identity in a stubborn refusal to conform to anyone’s expectations—and how even people close to him felt like they didn’t really know him, who he really was, or who he wanted to be.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez.

Fittingly, the movie ends in 1965, just after Dylan goes “rogue” at the iconic Newport Folk Festival, causing a near riot by introducing a jangly bombast of electric instruments and drums for his three-song closing set—and then coming out, with just his acoustic guitar, to sing “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” It’s his final kiss-off to the folk darling he used to be, and how he started. Then he roars off on his motorcycle.

Music fans will dig it for sure, and everyone else—including those too young to “remember” Bob Dylan or the ‘60s—can certainly appreciate the care and attention that clearly went into depicting the events, and finally the pivotal moment when the young troubadour, only in his mid-20s, shook off folk music’s dusty past and headed down a highway into the future. Like a rolling stone, indeed.

—Neil Pond

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Dec 20 2024
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Uncategorized

The Entertainment Forecast

Dec. 20 – Dec. 26

Dolly’s Christmas party, a very special ‘The Price is Right’ & Frosty the Snowman’s X-rated past

All times Eastern.

FRIDAY, Dec. 20
Six Triple Eight
Kerry Washington stars in this tale inspired by the first and only Women’s Army Corps unit of color to serve overseas during WWII (Netflix).

National Christmas Tree Lighting
Annual TV tradition presented by the National Park Service and National Park Foundation, from President’s Park in Washington, D.C., with musical performances by Mickey Guyton, Trombone Shorty, James Taylor, The War and Treaty and Trisha Yearwood (8 p.m., CBS).

SATURDAY, Dec. 21
Frosty the Snowman
Jackie Vernon, who voiced Frosty in this 1969 stop-motion classic, was in real life a standup comedian fond of X-rated jokes. Now you know! (5:40 p.m., Freeform).

Cartoon Christmas
Get revved up for Christmas with vintage holiday episodes of Casper, Yogi Bear and The Flintstones (4 p.m., MeTV).

SUNDAY, Dec. 22
The Kennedy Center Honors
Tonight’s honorees include director Frances Ford Coppola, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, jazz master Autura Sandoval and the legendary music venue The Apollo. Hosted by Queen Latifah (9 p.m., CBS).

MONDAY, Dec. 23
Bird
Barry Keoghan (Saltburn) stars in this coming-of-age tale (above) set on the margins of contemporary English society (Mubi).

TUESDAY, Dec. 24
The Price is Right
Annual primetime special edition of the iconic game show honors “holiday heroes,” inviting first responders, police officers, firefighters and military members to “Come on down!” (8 p.m., CBS).

A Christmas Story
If you’re not doing anything else tonight, or even if you are, tune in anytime between tonight and tomorrow evening to the annual 24-hour marathon of this 1983 now-classic about a boy who only wants a BB gun for Christmas (begins 9 p.m., TNT).

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 25
Rudoph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
In this 1964 Christmas classic, the voice of Donner the reindeer is often mistaken as that of Don Knotts, the star of the era’s popular spy-spoof series Get Smart. But actually it’s the voice of Paul Kligman, who went on to voice Peter Parker’s newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson several years later for an animated Saturday-morning Spiderman series (11 a.m., Freeform).

Jeff Dunham’s Very Special Christmas Special
The ventriloquist and his dummy pals celebrate the Big C with some laughs (Comedy Central).

THURSDAY, Dec. 26
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas
The country queen draws on holidays past to find the unique “mountain magic” of Christmas. With performances by Jimmy Fallon, Willie Nelson, Miley Cyrus and more (9 p.m., NBC).

Ocean’s Eleven Franchise
Feeling a bit weary already of the holidays? Let George Clooney, Brad Pitt and all the other Oceans casts of all-stars steal your blahs away with a day-long marathon of heist dram-edy (1 p.m., Paramount).   

NOW HEAR THIS

Give a soulful gift of music with the new remastered vinyl edition of Stevie Wonder’s The Definite Collection (Motown/Ume), a hit-filled two-disc roundup with his very first No. 1 in 1963, a live version of “Fingertips,” continuing through the decades with “For Once in My Life,” “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” “Superstition,” “Higher Ground” and more. Complete with pics from the Motown Archives and track-by-track info.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

You might not see much connection between scary comic books and Sunday School, but author Matthew Brake sure does. In Horror Comics and Religion (McFarland), the professor of religious studies breaks down the fascinating thru-lines that connect pulpy ‘zines—like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror—to age-old religious ideas about hell, resurrection, redemption, demons, morality, the trinity, and more. It’s good stuff for horror buffs!  

Dec 19 2024
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Sonic the Hedgehog 3”

Jim Carrey all but steals the show from the little blue multimedia mammal

Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Starring Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter and the voices of Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba, Ben Schwartz and others
Directed by Jeff Fowler
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, Dec. 20

Since 1993—and Super Mario Bros.—Hollywood has been capitalizing on videogames and their built-in fan base of passionate gamers. Sonic the Hedgehog, the Japanese-based Sega series of the early ‘90s, has been one of the most successful, and most prolific, spilling over into television, comics and related games and generating its own galaxy of characters.

This third big-screen movie in the Sonic franchise continues the adventures of the quippy little blue computer-generated anthropomorphic hedgehog who can run faster than the speed of sound. Ben Schwartz (from TV’s Parks and Recreation) returns as the voice of Sonic, who’s joined again by his teammates, the brawny anteater Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) and Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessy), a gadget-guru fox.

It’s action-packed, zingy with wit and geared toward the generation-spanning audience the Sonic games and their multimedia spawn have been cultivating now for more than three decades. It’s a kid-friendly spy movie, a sci-fi tale, a meta heist comedy, a perilous adventure and a riff-tastic spin through time and space as Sonic faces off with another super-powered hedgehog named Shadow (voiced with just the right amount of angst by Keanu Reeves), discovering Shadow’s wrenching backstory and unraveling a sinister plot to, well, destroy the Earth.

There are shades of Mission Impossible, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Ocean’s 11, Armageddon, Austin Powers and James Bond, with nods to Godzilla and Casper the Friendly Ghost, loads of far-out gizmos and gimmicks and full-on montages orchestrated to the music of the Beach Boys and Jelly Roll. Even the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album cover gets a nod. And the moon gets sliced in half, like it was indeed made of cheese, and Sonic gets sucked into a gaping black hole. This little hedgehog sure covers a lot of ground.

Other familiar faces get in on the zaniness, including James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, Krysten Ritter, Shemar Moore and Natasha Rothwell. And Alyna Brown, the young Australian actress who played young Furiosa in this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, has a small part that resonates throughout the film.  

But the movie really belongs to Jim Carrey, who doubles down on his gonzo, over-the-top Jim Carrey-ness in a double role, returning as the rotund mad scientist Dr. Robotnik and also Robotnik’s mad-scientist grandfather. “It’s like we’re two characters, played by the same actor!” they both exclaim when they meet, looking into the camera for wink-wink emphasis. Carrey’s jokes fly fast and furious—even giving Sonic a run for his ha-ha’s—as he reflexively punches up nearly every scene with quips and puns and mannerisms and movie lines, from across the spectrum of his movie-comedy career, like he’s filling a carnival funhouse with his own greatest hits. If they handed out awards for best performance by Jim Carrey doing Jim Carrey alongside another Jim Carrey in a videogame franchise about a blue hedgehog, he’d be a solid shoo-in.

But for all its gung-ho go-for-it-ness, the movie has a soft, sensitive underbelly about friendship, family, making good choices, love and loss. It’s the awwwwwww at the center of all it all.

Fans of the franchise, of any age, will find a lot to like—especially in its end-scene hint of more to come. And everyone else, well, just sit back, buckle up and let Jim Carrey and Sonic take you on a way-out trip that suggests this speedy bright blue videogame breakout still has even more places for his blurry little legs to take him.

—Neil Pond

Dec 18 2024
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “The Brutalist”

Adrien Brody is an immigrant architect working to build an American dream in this sprawling post-Holocaust drama

The Brutalist
Starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pierce & Felicity Jones
Directed by Brady Corbet
Rated R

In limited release Friday, Dec. 20

Adrien Brody gives an impassioned starring performance as Lázló Tóth, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrates to America in 1947 to build a new life, hoping to draw on his pre-wartime work as an architect back in Hungary.

Taking its name from a mid-century architectural style, The Brutalist is big and bold as it majestically sprawls across the years and Lázló meets a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pierce) who wants him to oversee a monumental legacy project on a hillside in Doylestown, outside Pittsburgh.

This is a large-scale, epic movie, the kind of serious, soulful drama that generates significant Oscar buzz. It’s gorgeous and enormous (three and a half hours long), filled with dramatic intensity, terrific acting, a multi-tiered plotline, complex characters and over-arching themes about the immigrant experience, antisemitism, homelessness, the downside of the American dream and the lofty aesthetics of design. Add opium addiction, lusty sex, a deadly train derailment and a shocking rape for spicy seasoning.

Felicity Jones plays Tóth’s wife, stricken with osteoporosis from wrenching malnutrition in a concentration camp, forcibly separated from her husband in the turmoil of the battle of Budapest at the close of the war—and now confined to a wheelchair. Their teenage niece (Raffey Cassidy) is an orphan, rendered mute by the traumas of what she’s endured. Joe Alwyn is a pompous, smarmy son of privilege; you’ll want to reach through the screen and give him a good, hard slap across his smug face. A Black U.S. Army veteran (Zachari Bankolé) that Lázló meets in a soup line becomes a close friend.

It all looks amazing, with elaborate period detail and impressive, sometimes jaw-dropping visuals, the kind of grandiose skyscraper of a movie—with an overture, intermission and an epilogue—that harkens back to Hollywood epics of yore. The soundtrack—with originals by composer Daniel Blumberg—is auditory magnificence. The movie towers over most others by its sheer scope, unbridled ambition and elegant artistic vision, like the massive, concrete, steel and granite construction project at its core—an achievement designed not just for the present, but a thing to be admired far into the future. The Brutalist isn’t a popcorn matinee movie. It’s a cinematic triumph, a thing of beauty constructed for the ages, and one I promise you’ll watch in awe.  

—Neil Pond

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Dec 13 2024
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The Entertainment Forecast

Dec. 13 – Dec. 19

An evening with Dua Lupa, rocking through the years with Elton, and Nate Bargatze’s all-star Nashville Christmas special

All times Eastern.

Elton John hangs with John Lennon in a new rock documentary.

FRIDAY, Dec. 13
Elton John: Never Too Late
The iconic singer reflects on his life and five-decade career in this new rock doc. Plus, you’ll get to hear a brand-new EJ song! (Disney+).

Wonder Pets: In the City
New animated series for preschoolers about a trio of critters (a snake, bunny and guinea pig) who live in a kindergarten in New York City when not zooming all over the world in a “Jetcar” to rescue other animals in need (Apple TV+).

SATURDAY, Dec. 14
Disney’s A Christmas Carol
Jim Carrey is Ebenezer Scrooge in this 2009 retelling of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, with The Princess Bride’s Robin Wright and Cary Elwes in bit parts (10 a.m., Freeform).

Christmas All the Way Marathon
Celebrate the upcoming holiday with Elf, Four Christmases and The Polar Express (AMC).

SUNDAY, Dec. 15
Dexter: Original Sin
TV’s favorite serial killer returns for a new origin-story series starring Patrick Gibson and Christian Slater, with a special guest appearance by Sarah Michelle Geller (Paramount+).

An Evening with Dua Lipa
The global superstar (above) performs her hits and new material with backing by a symphony orchestra in London’s famed Albert Hall (8:30 p.m., CBS).

MONDAY, Dec. 16
Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry
Little Big Town hosts this all-star musical holiday celebration from Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry House, with performances from Kelsea Ballerini, Sheryl Crow, Josh Groban, Kate Hudson and more (8 p.m., NBC).

Brenda Lee: Rockin’ Around
Keith Urban, Pat Benatar and others weigh in on the pint-sized hitmaker, how her early fame and a life of poverty shaped her artistry across pop, rock and country, and how her signature song, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” became a holiday perennial (10 p.m., PBS).

TUESDAY, Dec. 17
Trans-Siberian Orchestra: The Ghosts of Christmas Eve
Ossie Davis narrates, Jewel makes an appearance, and the famed Trans-Siberian Orchestra plays for this grand-scale tale of a runaway’s journey home on the night before Christmas (8 p.m., AXS).

The Beverly Hillbillies
What better, the week before Christmas, than to watch this vintage episode of The Beverly Hillbillies from 1968, called “Week Before Christmas,” in which the Clampetts prepare to visit Hooterville for the holidays (9 a.m., MeTV).

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 18
The Secret Life of Animals
Hugh Bonneville narrates the 10-part docuseries (above) about the behaviors and innate intelligence of the natural world around us, from fish to frogs and kangaroos and raccoons (Apple TV+).

A Saturday Night Live Christmas
Re-watch memorable Christmas skits and sketches from the show’s 50 (yes, 50!) years of the iconic weekend comedy series (9 p.m., NBC).

THURSDAY, Dec. 19
A One Hour Ghostmas Special
A leaky water heater threatens to ruin everyone’s holiday plans in this holiday episode of Ghosts (8 p.m., CBS).

Lost Treasures of the Bible
The Good Book gets a good look in this docuseries that follows archaeological teams uncovering and investigating cities and civilizations featured in the Bible in some of its most famous stories, like the Tower of Babel (9 p.m., National Geographic). 

Nate Bargatze’s Nashville Christmas
The acclaimed “clean” comedian mixes stand-up yuks with pretaped comedy shorts, sketches, musical performance and special guests (9 p.m., CBS).

BRING IT HOME

Lady Gaga joins Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie À Deux (Warner Bros. Home Entertainment), a continuation of the tale of Batman’s “trickiest” villain, now with a new accomplice/squeeze. One trick here: It’s dang near a musical! Extras include a longform making-of documentary, and other behind-the-scenes goodies.

One of the most critically hailed films of the year, Conclave (Universal) arrives now on Blu-ray. Rallph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow lead the cast in the story of a group of priests gathering—in conclave—to elect a new pope. It’s got intrigue, suspense, secrecy, scandal and surprises galore…and that’s all before the timely shocker at the end. Highly recommended.  

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