Dylan Baker

In 2009, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani referred to Philip Roth’s novella The Humbling as “an overstuffed short story, […] a slight, disposable work about an aging man’s efforts to grapple with time and loss and mortality, and the frustrations of getting old.” In 2015, that sentiment rings just as true of Barry Levinson’s adaptation of the same work. The Humbling runs too long, dawdles too much, makes hollow caricatures of its women, and muddles its intentions. Its most redeeming features are its performances; Al Pacino is in top form, with Greta Gerwig playfully keeping up. But neither can elevate this failed attempt at pathos above what it is: bland.

Selma Written by Paul Webb Directed by Ava DuVernay UK / USA, 2014 Selma is a shining example of how to create an informative biographical drama that still packs an emotional wallop.  Rather than trying to portray the entire life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, director Ava DuVernay captures the essence of King …

The Good Wife is obsessed, especially lately, with memory, with subjective experience and the way it colors our entire perceptions of the world around us. We never get out of our heads, after all. Everything we ever experience is colored by this limitation. Our senses and our recollections are all we have to tie us to the past, and to help us pull ourselves forward. The world outside ourselves is something we can only do our best to conceive of. Anything but our own flawed memory is pure conjecture.

For Smash though it seems immensely easy to tell what’s going to happen next. From last week’s previews we got a sense that Ivy wouldn’t get along with her mother (and why should she? Bombshell is Ivy’s moment, her mother has had her chances) and Karen’s father is going to question what Karen is doing with her life since she left Bombshell.

2 Days in New York Written by Julie Delpy and Alexia Landeau Directed by Julie Delpy France/Germany/Belgium, 2012 Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris, which documented her character’s struggling relationship with American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) while visiting her home city of Paris, was a rewarding comedy with pleasing one-note simplicity. Arriving five years later …