David Hinckley

Even when some of the results are rather shoddy, there is no humiliation. The judges limit themselves to a sympathetic, albeit honest, assessment. .... The filming is superb, and the baked goods look delectable. Plus, cooking for Mary Berry is a lot easier on the digestion than cooking for Gordon Ramsay. [26 Dec 2014

The fewer people who sleep well on Wednesday nights, the happier TNT will be. It's a goal partially realized. [11 July 2006, p.82]

Stranger things have happened, but it's going to take some powerful wizardry to whip Making the Band into must-see TV. [24 March 2000]

Some of the mystical stuff in The Defenders remains just that: mystical. But after a couple of episodes, and a couple of fights that resemble high-tech barroom brawls, viewers will get the rhythm of the story.

Gleeson does a first-rate job with a character we’ve seen before, the tormented cop who plunges into a battle where he’s seemingly outflanked and outgunned. Treadaway is suitably troubling as a kid who represses such waves of rage and frustration that we don’t doubt it could explode somewhere. That the causes of his rage play as clichés doesn’t make him less menacing, though it makes the larger story less than subtle. Call it a solid campfire yarn.

Thought-provoking and melancholy, like all good F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, The Last Tycoon delivers a good summer watch. ... All this said, The Last Tycoon has taken some critical heat, and not without cause. It has several unsparkling passages and weak spots.

Happily, in spite of the plot labyrinth that any conspiracy theory naturally creates, Salvation keeps its story understandable and makes us keep wanting to know what happens next.

The Defiant Ones sends you away admiring the two guys who made the big score.

It’s not a dealbreaker of an idea to take a famous historical figure and put him or her into a world that makes his or her life more relatable to young folks who come along several centuries later. It works better, though, if the modern trappings flavor the historic character, rather than the other way around.

It feels less bold than familiar, and thus, in its own way, perhaps too quickly comfortable.