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Snipes is back and you should still bet on black. Review by Brandon Wolfe The career trajectory of Wesley Snipes has been something of a whirlwind. The actor made a huge splash in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with roles in such films Major League , Mo’ Better Blues , New Jack City and White Men Can’t Jump , a disparate collection of parts united by the redoubtable force of Snipes’ charisma. Snipes was one of those actors who could do comedy, drama and action, all with equal amounts of bravado. By the time he began what would become his signature role as Blade, Snipes, a lifelong, black belt martial artist, had pared his career down solely to stoic action-hero parts, jettisoning most of the jubilant personality he displayed earlier in his career. After the Blade trilogy came to an end, Snipes wound up in the direct-to-video ghetto before tax issues landed him in prison. The Wesley Snipes that emerged from incarceration feels like an actor reborn, with the palpable joy of perform

After a killer opening, it's all downhill for NBC series. Review by Brandon Wolfe Blindspot , the new NBC series, has emerged as one of the fall TV season’s most buzzed-about new shows based almost entirely on the strength of its opening sequence, which, it must be said, is a doozy. A cop in Times Square notices a large, unattended duffel bag on the sidewalk. Upon further examination, he finds a note affixed to the bag demanding that the FBI be contacted at once. Cut to a few hours later and Times Square is an abandoned crime scene, with the bomb squad attempting to discern the contents of the bag. When the bag begins moving, the technician is stunned to find that it contains a nude, disoriented woman ( Thor ’s Jaimie Alexander) covered from head to toe in tattoos. This is most certainly a grabber, but it’s really all Blindspot has going for it, at least in its pilot. Once the series starts unpacking the meat of its story, it becomes abundantly clear that what we’re being se

Cult series steps away from the table. Review by Brandon Wolfe Hannibal ’s third, and ultimately final, season carried with it the problem of reverence. In the first two seasons, the series carved out its own territory apart from Thomas Harris’ novels, staking its claim to the heretofore unexplored era prior to Red Dragon , when Will Graham worked as an FBI profiler and Hannibal Lecter was a psychiatrist and advisor. In these seasons, the show operated as a wackadoo procedural, a CSI where killers operate as avant-garde artists who will sew you into a tapestry with a hundred other bodies, fashion your corpse into a biological tree or rip you apart while wearing animal adornments and operating as a self-appointed werewolf. It was completely, gloriously insane, and it felt fresh and new. But with the third season, series creator Bryan Fuller made the understandable decision to finally tackle Harris’ source material, taking on adaptations of both the Hannibal and Red Dragon novels,

Series finally Hannibalizes Red Dragon Review by Brandon Wolfe One of the facets that made Hannibal ’s second season such a propulsive joy was its unpredictability. There was the tantalizing sense from week to week of not having the slightest clue where the show was going. Tackling areas outside of Thomas Harris’ source material freed the series from the shackles of rote translation, taking the characters to places unfamiliar to scholars of the Harris mythos. Will’s imprisonment, his ambiguous relationship with Hannibal Lecter, and even the fates of notable characters like Frederick Chilton, these elements were all played with wild-card abandon, clueing us into the notion that nothing we knew about these people was considered sacred. This was a series willing to play fast and loose with our perceptions of these characters and the events surrounding them. Hannibal was thrilling because it was rewriting the book on these people. Hell, it was rewriting four books. If Season 3 has fe

We now conclude the Hannibal portion of Hannibal. Review by Brandon Wolfe The Hannibal section of Hannibal (by which, I constantly need to clarify, is the show’s adaptation of the storyline from the novel and film of the same name) finally comes to a close, perhaps not a moment too soon. The meat of the 1999 novel by Thomas Harris and its subsequent 2001 film adaptation by Ridley Scott, have given the show license to steer into its artsier tendencies, the story’s ghoulish Eurocentricities feeding into the small-screen version’s penchant for horrifically gorgeous art direction and floridly poetic musings, often to its detriment. The Italian job to hunt down Hannibal Lecter released the show from its procedural shackles, yet rather than feeling like a freedom, casting aside that template left the show feeling adrift and without structure. The Thomas Harris universe has always functioned best when the monster being hunted down was someone other than Hannibal Lecter, and the show didn

Will Graham is out for...vengeance? Review by Brandon Wolfe Hannibal continues to ease us slowly into its third season like a warm bath. Last week , we caught up with Hannibal and Bedelia on their dreamy – or nightmarish – European excursion, and now we are brought up to speed on Will and Abigail Hobbs. After a replay of last season’s drawn-out, stab-filled climax, Will awakens in a hospital bed to find Abigail greeting him with a large bandage on her neck. She claims that Hannibal knew how to slash her with such surgical precision as to leave her alive, yet despite that, she still claims loyalty to him. She wants to track him down not out of vengeance, but to reunite with the compelling man whose fate seems so powerfully intertwined with her own. Will claims to want the vengeance, but one wonders if there’s not a bit of that longing in him as well. These two men have a very complex relationship, after all. Eight months later, Will and Abigail arrive at the church in Italy where H

We conclude our Fall television preview series by focusing on NBC's offerings. Story by Sue Lukenbaugh NBC had a huge turn over. They canceled five new comedies - Marry Me , About a Boy , One Big Happy , A to Z and Bad Judge - and axed three dramas ( State of Affairs , Constantine and Allegiance . They added fourteen new series, including six comedies, seven dramas and one variety show, but only six will begin with the traditional September start. Best Time Ever – TUESDAYS 10|9c THIS FALL Plot: Five-time Emmy Award winner Neil Patrick Harris is coming to NBC on a new primetime variety series based on the U.K.'s hugely popular "Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway." The show will feature comedy sketches, musical numbers, mini game shows, hidden camera pranks on celebrities and appearances by A-list stars. My Verdict: This sounds like the variety show that I wanted to see from the Muppets, but it looks like a typical gameshow. It's a s

Dr. Lecter’s meal finally arrives after a long wait. Review by Brandon Wolfe Hannibal was one of last year’s many great television surprises. Like Fargo , it was a show that shouldn’t have worked, based on source material that didn’t seem like it would bend to the rigors of serialized television. The fact that it aired on NBC, a network that didn’t seem possible would, or could, ever go whole-hog on the sort of gruesomely explicit content one expects from any story featuring Hannibal Lecter, only made the series’ prospects seem even dimmer. But, after a solid yet not exquisite first season, Hannibal caught fire in its sophomore year, crafting a season as twisty and unpredictable as it was unprecedentedly gory by broadcast standards. Hannibal became this strange fever dream for its fans. We saw it with our own two eyes, but it didn’t seem real. How could it be this good? The series has been off the air for over a year now, its finale , airing the May before last, leaving the bul

The truth is out there, man. Review by Brandon Wolfe David Duchovny has always possessed a unique presence for a star. Charismatic while perpetually monotone, funny while dry as the Sahara, Duchovny’s quirkiness and ability to engage are not impeded by his clinical, manbot exterior. On The X-Files , Duchovny found the perfect conduit for his skills in Fox Mulder, a character who, like Duchovny, had a square outer layer incongruously concealing the eccentric charmer underneath. That this suit-wearing stiff with the Ben Stein vocal inflection could also be a crackpot who believes in every paranormal anomaly under the sun summed up the strange juxtaposition inherent to the actor, that surprisingly smooth marriage of rigid and wild. In Aquarius , the new NBC crime series, Duchovny is handed a character that isn’t nearly as tailored to him as Mulder. He plays the awkwardly named Detective Sam Hodiak, a no-nonsense brute of a cop working the beat in 1967 Los Angeles. And though Duchovny

Find out which of your shows will live to see the fall. By Brandon Wolfe Now that the 2014-15 TV season has come to a close, you might be wondering which of your favorite shows will be returning and which will brighten your television set no longer. Well, wonder no more. Below is a comprehensive list, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter , of which shows have gotten the axe and which get to air another day, as well as early lists of new shows coming this fall, the fates of which you’ll get to agonize over this time next year. Steel yourself and scroll down. Veteran Shows America's Funniest Home Videos : Renewed The Bachelor : Renewed Castle : Renewed Dancing With the Stars : Renewed Extreme Weight Loss : Renewed The Goldbergs : Renewed Grey's Anatomy : Renewed Last Man Standing : Renewed Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. : Renewed The Middle : Renewed Mistresses : Renewed Modern Family : Renewed Nashville : Renewed Once Upon a Time : Renewed