Ken Tucker

The show’s plots — standard suspense fare so far — are warm comfort food for mystery buffs.

With its strong female performances — Snow and O’Grady are superbly nuanced — ”Dreams” maintains a nurturing warmth that appeals to young viewers as well as the boomers I mentioned earlier.

Its sexual-confusion subplots alone will make for a summer’s worth of sincere young actors reducing its target audience of skeptical young people to shrieks of appalled amusement.

Watching Pinchot flail through lousy punch lines and Cox endure ogling, you may find The Trouble With Larry not just not-funny, but actively depressing

King wants to scare your pants off while also removing your moral blinders, and he succeeds.

King and Garris’ Shining improves on Kubrick’s in its emotional depth and quality of performances. De Mornay pulls off the tricky role of Wendy, a loyal doormat who proves to be no pushover, and it’s a testament to Weber’s skill that Jack comes across as a sympathetic, even tragic, figure. As for young Mead, his Danny perfectly captures the mute terror of a child, for whom an angry parent can be as traumatizing as a house full of ghosts.

In addition to It‘s slow pace, I found the ending a big letdown — unimaginative special effects animate the monster in its final incarnation. But the cast is terrific, Curry’s cackle is chilling, and King’s usual buried theme — about the pain adults inflict on children without even realizing it (It?) — is always worth pondering.

The writer’s achievement here is to have provided us with the video equivalent of a good summer read — Golden Years is entertaining and substantial at the same time.

When Cohen taps into King’s greatest theme — families in peril from forces beyond their understanding — The Tommyknockers can be moving. The rest of the time, it’s never less than an entertaining goof.

This makes The Langoliers slow going in spots, but it’s also a lot more fun than most TV movies...Pinchot turns in a wonderfully delirious performance as a grown-up abused child driven to succeed as a banker by memories of his cruel daddy. And even though the langoliers are pretty obviously computer-animated special effects, these little meatballs are still pretty scary. I’d rather watch them than a Susan Lucci TV movie any day.