Malcolm Venable

Ratched works very well as a moody, sensual thriller even if it's not so much an intellectual exploration.

P-Valley blends the profane, the sacred, and the politics of the almighty dollar to tell sharp, wildly engrossing stories about Black women on the margins who use their bodies to keep families and whole communities afloat. It's also one of the year's best new shows.

Hollywood is a retro fairy tale — a progressive, partly preposterous semi-lucid dream in which the underdogs actually win. It's unbelievable but sumptuous, just like all fairy tales should be.

For fashion junkies, and for people who find Naomi Campbell's shade as life-giving as chlorophyll, Making the Cut is catnip. Just don't look for anything revolutionary. It sticks to a formula, and that's fine. The formula works for a reason.

As a piece of scholastic infotainment, the series has tons of merit. But as a piece of prestige television, it falls short.

Godfather of Harlem has a way of sucking viewers into its seductive sphere, where silly asides live comfortably with explosive, gory violence as well as informed dreams of what Harlem might've been like at a pivotal point in history.

While The Politician's loopy turns can sometimes make it feel like the marriage of a live-action cartoon and a Wes Anderson movie, it's never dull and always comes back to the same question: What do you have to be made of to be president today?

The rhapsodic and dreamy timbre of Moonlight, the film that won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017, comes to life again in David Makes Man, a gorgeous, attention-grabbing new series on the OWN Network.

Up 'til now, it's been a serious show that happened to be funny. In Season 3, the formula flips: Dear White People is a very funny show with serious stories to tell, and it's more enjoyable than ever.

As it progresses, Grand Hotel seems confident to check a whole bunch of boxes — thriller, family drama, crime story, and workplace dramedy — yet eventually, the hodgepodge of styles gets distracting and the story overly melodramatic.