Archie Panjabi and Christopher Plummer Make for a Thrilling ‘Departure’: TV Review

The Country Music Association has officially announced the hosts for the 54th annual CMA Awards.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticTwo years ago, Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” was the most pleasant of surprises — though perhaps “pleasant” is not the word. The series was often terrifying, thanks in part to strong pacing, performances that worked across the board and a willingness to wear an unusual ambition and intellect proudly.

recent hit “Manifest,” there’s no supernatural element to “Departure,” but there’s still endless possibilities for what happened to the plane. Kendra and her team must find out if there was an equipment failure or a more nefarious cause including a hijacking.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticToo often, period pieces about the making of America treat the past with undue dignity, turning the raucousness and rambunctiousness of a two-and-a-quarter-century pageant of personalities into a chamber piece. American history is serious, sure, but it’s also giddy and strange, and too few entertainments treat it that way.

In a Mexico City recording studio in 1999, the planets aligned. At the center of the jubilant cross-cultural, intergenerational music sessions was Francisco Fellove Valdés, stage name El Gran Fellove, who half a century earlier had combined Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz to create a new style of scat singing.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticParis has long been the staging ground for a particular sort of American fantasy, one that tends to bring the characteristics of Americans into sharp relief. In the final episodes of “Sex and the City,” to cite one example, Carrie Bradshaw attempts a warm embrace of all the City of Light has to offer, but finds that she may in fact be too warm, that the cool briskness of Paris is making her someone she does not recognize.

Machetes, myths and murky storytelling all find their way into Tragic Jungle (Selva Trágica), the lushly made, if highly enigmatic, fifth feature from Mexican writer-director Yulene Olaizola (Fogo), which screened in the main slate of the New York Film Festival after premiering in the Horizons section in Venice.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticAn Israeli-produced series debuting on Apple TV Plus, “Tehran” is a show that looks at Iran through an alternately adversarial and nostalgic lens.

Anthony D'Alessandro Editorial Director/Box Office EditorEXCLUSIVE: We hear that The Wrestler Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke has boarded the independent feature The Commando which will shoot in New Mexico next month.The pic, directed by Asif Akbar, follows a DEA agent with PTSD who returns home after a botched mission and must now protect his family from a newly released prison criminal, played by Rourke, and his henchmen who’ve come after a stash of millions inside the agent’s house.Subscribe to

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“The Walking Dead” is edging up, this October, to its tenth anniversary on the air. That decade of ratings dominance has seen our own world grow nihilistic enough to make the series feel more tonally appropriate to the mood of the moment.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticOpening this year’s Emmy Awards, host Jimmy Kimmel told the audience — the one at home, given that there was no one sitting before him in the stands of the Staples Center — that there were a great many moving parts in piecing together the ceremony. He asked, mordantly, “What could possibly go right?”It turns out: Quite a bit.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIt’s perhaps surprising Kim Cattrall hadn’t yet headlined a soap opera. As Samantha Jones on “Sex and the City,” her slyness and way with a pun came to be revealed as elegant concealments of the character’s deep need.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe best talk show hosts are made into stars by the medium. To wit: Rosie O’Donnell was a well-known comic and actor but hardly the dynamo she eventually became when she began her daily show.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn its first three seasons, “Fargo” found a surprising amount of elasticity within its constrained format. Each installment borrowed the tone of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 Midwestern noir, which places human greed against a setting of frigid climate and rigid propriety, to tell increasingly complicated crime stories.

Ever since the original premiere of Fox's 24 was delayed because of the uncomfortable confluence of the tragic events of 9/11 and the explosion of a plane in the first episode, it has seemed almost inevitable that eventually we'd get a version of 24 in which Jack Bauer's beloved CTU was replaced by the NTSB or some comparably fictionalized transportation investigation bureau.

Angelina Jolie in “A Mighty Heart,” is the series' big star, her face on the poster, front and center.“As a child growing up, I never felt I would have that opportunity because there weren’t that many roles for somebody like me leading a show. And I was quite happy to take second or third position as long as I was working,” she says.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIf America’s modern space age began in the 1960s, it hit a wall in 1986 with the Challenger disaster, when the U.S. space shuttle by that name exploded during takeoff, killing all seven crew members aboard.

Occasionally, in this line of work, you end up watching a movie bad enough to make you regret taking the assignment. Roseanne Liang‘s “Shadow in the Cloud” is a movie so bad, it made me regret choosing the profession.

Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos still have plenty of passion for one another. The Riverdale actor, 49, thrilled fans when he gushed about his beautiful wife, 49, during an interview on Sirius XM Radio’s Quarantine with Bruce on Friday and revealed what he finds most attractive about her. Mark was being quizzed about his new project with Kelly, the Mexican Gothic book they’re turning into a series for Hulu.But fans got more than they’d bargained for when he started talking about their

Mark Consuelos seems just as in love with Kelly Ripa as he did when they tied the knot in 1996. The “Riverdale” star gushed over the “Live!” host in a recent interview while discussing their latest business venture together.