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For Donald Sutherland 's performance alone, I give it a top rating. As the powerful, but loving father and grandfather, Sutherland deserves an Emmy. I thought Kidman was fine...beautiful and ethereal. As a mental health professional myself, I believed she lacked credibility in her role as a clinical psychologist , but believe she played her part as the betrayed wife very well. And, by the way, what happened to her patients as her life was unraveling? Did she take a leave from her practice? Refer them to a colleague? Hugh Grant played Hugh Grant...the dapper charmer who's a cad and worse. Finally, for the cinematography alone, The Undoing deserves praise. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable viewing experience.

Am I the only viewer who thought that Timothy Chalumet looked like a pre-pubescent child, rather than the suitor of two of the March sisters? Frail, with virtually no musculature or appearance of masculinity, he looked like the girls' child, rather than someone these beauties would be attracted to. And, God help us, he might have been wearing the dress of that period, but all that I could think of was the infamous Seinfeld puffy shirt. He was totally outclassed by the otherwise wonderful cast. I'm grateful that I waited for it to become a 7-day DVD at my library.

I make it a practice to stop reading or watching anything containing the sadistic murders of children and/or animals. This show's barbaric slaughter of the Village madman's German Shepherd left me shocked and sickened. Its not the first time a family pet has been gratuitously butchered in a foreign detective series. I don't understand this. When we watch crime dramas, we expect violence, , at times, brutal and cruel. But family pets? A while back, in another foreign series, it was the family's Irish Wolfhound. The Break was weird enough with a panoply of enough psychotic characters...including the protagonist...to qualify for honorable mention in the DSM IV. I would caution anyone expecting a straightforward crime procedural, to run....not walk away ...from this series.

I just began watching the series and the first 3 episodes of Season 1 mesmerized me with its twists and turns. After that, it became simply beyond credulity. I also want to say that what happened when the cutthroat sociopaths broke into Gates home and what he found upon coming home, lost me completely. I'm not going to put in a spoiler, but whether it's a book, a movie or a series, what greeted Gates when he came home is on my list of things which end any interest i have in continuing whatever it is that I'm watching or reading.

I was mesmerized by the first two seasons. Then came Season 3 and I stopped watching the first episode halfway through. Clair Foy was dazzling as Queen Elizabeth, Olivia Coleman looked as though she had a chronic case of constipation. Or, in the words of Dorothy Parker "Her emotions ran the gamut from A to B " . The first Princess Margaret was stunning and charismatic; this season's was frumpy, dumpy and utterly unsympathetic. The geniuses who created the New Coke to replace the old formula apparently worked on this production. They tried to take a winning formula and ended up with an unpalatable mixture unfit for human consumption.

I watched the first eight seasons of Silent Witness and loved the character of Sam Ryan. I dont know if she left by choice or whether her character was simply written out of the series but unless I find out that the new recruit has moved on or gotten sick or been murdered, I can't bear to watch it any longer. Where in the world did they dig up this bubble brain who starts out as a forensic anthropologist and somehow gets hired as a pathologist.

Her overabundance of perk and non-stop bouncing aound the department make me seriously question whether she has bi-polar disorder and needs to be medicated. For Heaven's sake, she's supposed to be a pathologist, not a prom queen. And this opinion comes after just watching a couple of episodes!

Got a 4 rating instead of a 1 only for the cast, with the exception of Maia, who must have gotten the part only because she was related to someone. The faux cursing is ridiculous; either let the words come out or don't put them into the script. And the sappy songs....how can anyone ruin a Cat Stevens song? He should sue !

Moreover, some of us watch series like this to escape the depressing, dispiriting political winds that disrupt us daily. Who needs to hear about the grandiose, pathological sociopath in the White House on a show meant to entertain? The creators of this show need to decide on whether they want a show that's smart or a show that uses gimmicky stunts that are too cute by half. And I'm only reviewing Season 1!

It was bad enough before they tied the knot. Once they got back from the French countryside, it was even worse. Same tired cast of regulars, i.e. sycophants,, same quarter century old tales of Joe 's glorious congressional service, and Mika's attempts to seem like anything other than a prop. But wait! It gets worse!

Since they made it legal, there's not a week that goes by in which one or both of them are MIA, sometimes for days at a time. A couple of weeks ago, Mike was gone for a week, only to proudly announce upon her return, that she had gone to climb Mt Kilamangaro with her daughter. Everyone was suitably impressed, while Joe went on about how rough the separation had been for him. 😥. This week, Mika was MIA Thursday and Friday leading into the Labor Day weekend, leaving Joe to fumble his way through as long as I could hear to watch it. Which was for about 20 minutes. And for this they get paid millions of dollars a year. I'll do the show a lot less and promise to show up for work more than half the time. Promise.

I have been reading, over the years, about the cover-up by the Church hierarchy,of rampant sexual abuse by priests throughout the world. I have placed that side by side with the Church's hypocritical stances on homosexuality and women's reproductive rights and looked forward to viewing this look inside the walls of the priesthood and of the Vatican.

"Mea Culpa Maxima" is a tour de force. Viewed through the prism of the deaf survivors of sexual predator, Father Murphy, throughout their childhood years at a school for the deaf, it is impossible to watch this without rage and sorrow. Rage at the Church hierarchy which sanctioned the abuse of children through silence and inaction, sorrow for the many thousands of children throughout the world who have seen their childhoods stolen from them.

The movie focuses primarily on the sociopathic predator, Murphy, who somehow talked himself into believing that he was helping these young boys to deal with their emerging sexuality, often within the privacy of the confessional. The commentary of the adult survivors is heartbreaking and riveting.

Thwarted at every turn, this band of survivors resorts to blanketing their community with "Wanted" posters, depicting Father Murphy as a serial child molester. The movie traces the elevation of Joseph Ratzinger, who received scores of reports of pedophilia, through the ranks of the Church, making a final stop as Pope.

The commentary of New York Times reporter, Lorie Goodstein, who began writing of this horror years ago, along with Church officials who were turned away by the Vatican when attempting to address these grievances and the attorney who ultimately filed a case against the Vatican and individual members of the Church hierarchy, turns this into a crime procedural that is both gripping and frustrating.

"Mea Culpa Maxima" merits not only the highest praise, but also deserves to be considered for every major award for a documentary offered by the major film academies.

Violence and gore for the sake of violence and gore. Dumb dialogue and blood spatter every couple of seconds.I have an unwritten rule for books and movies/TV shows: the minute there is gratuitous animal torture or killing, I'm done. As soon as I saw the wall of family pets that had gone missing, I knew what was happening. The fate of the missing German Shepherd was disgusting and unnecessary. (Full disclosure: I've owned German Shepherds for my entire adult life, but would have found the wanton slaughter of any helpless being equally repulsive.)

Just what we need are more sadistic serial killer wannabes using this stuff as a template for their fifteen minutes of fame.

Why would Bacon have wasted his time on this turkey? He's talented and deserves a better chance to showcase himself.

Perhaps it's my training as a psychotherapist, but throughout the movie, I was wondering where were the psychological and psychiatric interventions. Other than a perfunctory assessment by a pediatrician, who sees no indication of autism and pronounces Kevin "just fine," there are no indications that these parents sought professional help. Both parents enabled Kevin's increasing psychopathic behavior.

Kevin's grisly slaughter of his sister's pet guinea pigs (which his mother seems not even to have revealed to the father) and his assault leading to the loss of his sister's eye seem to be denied by his parents as an imminent danger to all of them.

I also reject the characterization of Eva as an emotionally refrigerated mother (which was years ago cited as a cause of autism). Rather, I believe that she sensed there was something odd and very dark about this child. In the wild, he would have been rejected by his mother and left to die.

Whether Kevin is diagnosed as a sociopath or an attachment disordered child, there appears to have been little interest on the family's part in identifying and dealing with a disorder that presaged what was to become a bloodbath of monumental proportions.

For that reason, I downgraded the film. The acting was wonderful, particularly that of Ezra Miller, but the parents were unsympathetic characters, not only for their massive denial, but for their failure to address the reality of the their son's disordered psyche.

I finally got this DVD from my library and am so happy that I didn't pay to see the movie. I started getting angry as soon as I saw the toxic couple at the beginning of this movie, but, things devolve even more, if possible.

Everyone in this abject failure is a caricature; Wilson, as the nebbish-on-steroid Allen persona, his fiancée as the screech-y,throughly unlikeable Material Girl; her parents, as the Mitt Romney-esque 1%'s; the other couple is straight out of the movie line from "Annie Hall," the one in which Marshall McLuhan steps out of a cardboard poster and tells them that "you know nothing of me and my work." And what's up with Wilson's ultimate soul mate... a Mia Farrow clone? Any Freudian meanings there? The good news is that I could fast-forward through a lot of the nonsense to what was the inevitable breakup of this thoroughly unsympathetic couple. Allen is capable of such good writing...he must have done this for the money and a paid trip to Paris.

Unlike many of the reviewers, I felt nothing but anger and contempt for Terry, the jailer of these poor animals. Although he professed his "love" for his lions, he was barely able to take care of himself, much less these magnificent creatures. He preferred to confine them to a horse trailer rather than find a sanctuary which would give them a better life. Watching Lambert's agonizing and unnecessary death in his squalid cage will give me nightmares for many nights to come.

The true hero of this film is the officer who has no legal recourse to remove these animals and tries in every way to make their lives bearable. The true villains are the state legislatures which have refused to ban the sale and keeping of exotic pets. Even the footnote at the end of the film has its ironies. While Governor Strickland signed a law banning the sale and keeping of exotics in Ohio, his unworthy successor, John Kasich has taken much of the teeth from the law.

Let's all agree that Angelina Jolie is a beautiful woman. That doesn't give the movie a pass and her looks alone are not enough to carry it. In a film that runs about 100 minutes, probably 45 of them were car chases, foot chases and shoot 'em ups. I knew we were in for a rough ride when the first 40 minutes had a bunch of Keystone Kops trying to corral Jolie and it was all downhill from there. Given her limited dialogue, Jolie is not half bad, nor is her supporting cast; however, the movie made less and less sense as time went on and the finale (no spoiler here) did not lessen my feeling that I could have been doing something more productive with my time....like cleaning the litter box or emptying the dishwasher.

I used to like watching The McLaughlin Group and have seen a progression of panelists evolve throughout the years; however, I must say that I have watched it less and less since Monica Crowley joined the show. Her disdain for Eleanor Clift is palpable and her need to dominate the discussion is enabled by John McLaughlin, who is clearly besotted with her. There is a mean-spiritedness about Ms. Crowley that transcends simple participation and anyone who has heard her radio show knows that her radio persona is harshly ideological and vitriolic.

While I agree that this show is loud, opinionated and sometimes raucous, it is also clear that most of the "old guard" is fond of one another; Ms. Crowley is another matter. I do believe that she sees herself as a contender for John McLaughlin's seat if and when he retires and is tireless in her efforts to position herself at the forefront of discussion. Again, her constant interruptions of Eleanor Clift, as well as her general demeanor toward Ms. Clift are shameful, as is Mr. McLaughlin's indulgence of this.

As for Mort Zuckerman: I'm not quite sure of the reasoning behind putting him on the same side of the "table" as Eleanor Clift. While clearly very bright and obviously very successful, he tends to lean more toward the views of Pat Buchanan and John McLaughlin. He's certainly not the reason, however, that I have taken this show off my DVR. To Ms. Crowley goes that honor.

I loved this film, mainly because of Joan Allen's brilliance. Jeremy Irons, on the other hand, was overwrought and made the Stieglitz character more of a caricature than the mercurial, talented artist that Stieglitz was in his own right.All of the other characters were incidental, although Ed Begley Jr. acquitted himself admirably.

The New Mexico landscape was wonderful and anything that gave us a glimpse of O'Keefe's talent added to the virtues of the film. Ultimately, though, it was Allen's luminosity that made the film successful; she brought the character alive in a way that no other actress could. She seems to have an uncanny ability, not unlike Meryl Streep, to BECOME any character rather than simply playing a part and following a script. Don't know if she received any awards for the role, but should have.