My Courses

On March 10th, a six-month odyssey will end. Every year starting in early September, Oscar season consumes Hollywood, with expensive campaigns launched and carefully orchestrated rollouts devised. Although the endless chase for trophies might be a turnoff to some, I think, on the whole, the idea of putting a spotlight on great films is a…

Ubisoft’s “Skull and Bones” finally set sail this month after years of production woes and release delays. The game began development over a decade ago, initially starting life as an expansion of the company’s critically and commercial successful “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.” That excellent game, one of the best in the long-running “Assassin’s Creed”…

A broken system validates itself in “Article 20,” a Chinese New Year legal thriller that also happens to be a domestic farce and, oh yeah, the latest movie directed by mainland hitmaker Zhang Yimou. Only a filmmaker as hawkish, conflicted, and masterful as Zhang (“Hero,” “Full River Red”) could have sutured together the malformed parts…

I have Spectrum Wi-Fi and cable service at home, and it offers “free” on-demand movies, so I called one of them up recently: “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen this 15-year-old film: Towards the end, the beloved wizard Dumbledore is killed by his colleague Severus Snape while the…

With the current abysmal streaming landscape where shows are thrown onto services to collect dust like old VHS tapes, it’s impossible not to feel like TV has been in need of shows that feel like an event. The times of epics like “Breaking Bad” are long over, as are the times where series were able…