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Before we dive into Night 3 of The Voice’s Season 13 Battles, perhaps we should address a mini-controversy: Am I grading on a curve? On one hand, maybe, since I’m comparing, say, Davon Fleming to Dave Crosby and not Bruno Mars. On the other, not really. The reason I end up handing out so many decent-to-good grades isn’t a curve, it’s that none of these singers are really D or F bad. The Voice doesn’t trot out William Hung types, so I kind of have no need for failing grades. That settled, let’s move on to Monday’s battles,...

As The Voice’s Season 13 Blind Auditions drew to a close Tuesday, coach Miley Cyrus made a big to-do about her hopes of rounding out the show’s first-ever all-female team. But the chatter might have been just a distraction technique, as she was stealthily assembling the season’s strongest lineup, including standouts Ashland Craft and Moriah Formica. Do you think Miley’s got the crew to beat? Before you size up the coaches’ rosters in the comments, let’s review the final group of singers advancing to next week’s Battles and see if the erstwhile Hannah Montana managed to make Voice herstory.

Exclusive: New series to introduce sci-fi elements and touch on both migrant crisis and rise of populist politics.

French director Bruno Dumont will present his plans for the second season of his hybrid spoof police procedural TV series Li’l Quinquin at the European Film Market (Efm) this week (Feb 9-17). Paris-based Doc & Film International is handling sales.

Like the first series, it will be set in Dumont’s trademark setting of the Opal Coast in northern France and its surrounding countryside.

Entitled Coincoin And The Extra-humans, the drama will revisit the life of social misfit Quinquin who is now grown up and goes by the nickname of CoinCoin.

He spends his time loafing about the area and attending meetings of the Nationalist Party with his friend Fatso. His childhood sweetheart Eve has now left him for a woman

Like the previous series, it will play with the conventions of TV drama. In what appears...

French director Bruno Dumont’s forensic-thriller farce features one of the funniest and weirdest scenes of the year

You can keep your Scandi noir. What about northern French forensic-thriller farce? This is the latest film from that quite extraordinary French director, Bruno Dumont. He has decided to vacate his creative heartland of fierce social realism in favour of acid black comedy – an epic designed originally to be shown on TV in four 50-minute parts – starring Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jore as Van Der Weyden and Carpentier, two incompetent rural cops on the trail of a serial killer who leaves body parts inside barnyard animals.

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Life of Quinquin: Dumont’s Foray into Miniseries Format Filled with His Brand of Peculiar Humor

Provocative auteur Bruno Dumont lets loose his comedic side with a four part miniseries, Li’l Quinquin, shown as one long piece at the Cannes Film Festival. While it apparently will be released in English speaking territories in the same fashion, its purposeful structure does make it seem better served to be viewed in more than one sitting, where its bizarre weirdness has a better chance of really sinking in. But one has to remember that we’re talking about Dumont here, the director who grapples with existential ennui usually through the lens of religious discord or the bleak isolation of rural settings. So the project is indeed the most comedic offering of the director’s oeuvre, following last year’s captivating look at sculptor Camille Claudel starring Juliette Binoche. Yet it’s not...

The following exchange took place between critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young over email between 4 and 8 August, not long after Li’l Quinquin screened at Wrocław’s New Horizons International Film Festival—following its world-premiere at Cannes earlier this year, and now playing at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Set in a village in northern France and originally made in four parts for transmission on French television, Bruno Dumont’s latest work is 200 minutes in length and chronicles an unorthodox murder investigation conducted by Capt Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) under the watchful eyes of a rambunctious kid known only by his nickname, Li'l Quinquin (Alane Delhaye).

Spoiler Warning: this exchange reveals and discusses significant plot details of Li’l Quinquin

Michael Pattison: You remarked on Twitter earlier that you were still thinking about Li’l Quinquin a day after seeing it—that, having slept on it, the film...

Boardwalk Empire, Season 2, Episode 09, “Battle of the Century”

Written by Steve Kornacki

Directed by Brad Anderson

Airs Sunday at 9pm Et on HBO

Jimmy Darmody consolidates his new position as King of Atlantic City boardwalk, but also makes some bad decisions. Nucky travels to Ireland with a proposition for its whiskey distillers, while back at home a deadly illness strikes someone close to him.

Atlantic City’s booze business now belongs to Jimmy Darmody. Or so he thinks. Nucky Thomson’s abdication in last week’s episode is strictly temporary, but Jimmy’s weaknesses are starting to show. He’s either too arrogant or too self obsessed to allow the thought into his head that Nucky might be playing a long game. Michael Pitt has struggled to show the conflicts in the character of Jimmy Darmody, but in this episode he does a better job of capturing a man who...

The "Fight of the Century" between Dempsey and Carpentier served as a nice back drop to this week's Boardwalk Empire episode "Battle of the Century."

Granted, there wasn't a lot of violence (minus the icky meat cleaver scene), but there were plenty of underhanded dealings and vicious moves. This was a great followup to Nucky's departure from his Atlantic City office last week, giving us every reason to be excited for the final episodes of the season.

The ending of last week's installment not only indicated that Nucky was definitely still "in business" but also hinted at some serious health problems for Margaret's daughter, Emily. This week, the poor girl woke up unable to move her legs and the doctor confirmed Margaret's worst fear: Polio. The entire health crisis was difficult to watch, especially when Margaret struggled with the necessary quarantine.

The whole situation was made even more harrowing by Nucky's absence.

Do you remember seeing your first Terminator movie, and getting that creepy, itchy, uncomfortable feeling at the thought of a piece of autonomous intelligent machinery killing humans with electronic efficiency? It's not quite time to worry about that possible future yet--but there are a number of developments in robot evolution that might give you pause for thought.

Since first used in World War I (yes, even back then), robots have become an increasingly useful tool on the battlefield. Back then they were simple devices like the remote-controlled tracked Goliath robot (See video below.) developed in Germany to act as a "smart mine." There are certain situations that are too dangerous for a human, hence the need for expendable robots. And there are some things that a robot is actually better at.

That's why we hear so much about Predators and Global Hawks nowadays. Both are unmanned aerial vehicles that can...