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Since Dame Judi Dench is acting royalty she has no trouble playing the hell out of Queen Victoria in her last years on the throne of England. Even better, she lets her ingrained mischief remove any hints of sanctimony from the old girl. Sadly, Victoria & Abdul, directed by the usually scrappy Stephen Frears from a dutiful script by Lee Hall, only sets one place at the table. Abdul Karim (Bollywood star Ali Fazal), the lowly Indian Muslim clerk who's sent from Agra to England to present the Queen with a ceremonial coin,...

MaryAnn’s quick take… Charming based-on-fact British costume dramedy gently snarks about power and propriety but cuts a lot deeper when it comes to bigotry and bootlicking. I’m “biast” (pro): love Judi Dench, mostly love Stephen Frears’s films

I’m “biast” (con): we’re still telling stories about this dead queen?

I have not read the source material

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

The ribbing writes itself: Hey, they finally made the sequel to 1997’s Mrs. Brown! You know, the movie in which Judi Dench as Queen Victoria develops a close platonic friendship — or maybe even a romance — with royal groundskeeper John Brown in the early years of her widowhood, in the 1860s. It was a scandal! And now here’s Victoria & Abdul, which opens 20 years later and stars Judi Dench (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel...

As tends to be the case with Paul Schrader movies, “First Reformed” doesn’t sound like it’s for the faint of heart. Ethan Hawke stars as a grief-stricken ex-military chaplain, with Amanda Seyfried as a member of his church coping with the recent suicide of her husband. It’s currently making the festival rounds at Venice and Toronto, prompting the “Taxi Driver” screenwriter to talk about his latest project — and that time he was visited by the Dhs earlier this year.

Read More:‘First Reformed’ Review: Ethan Hawke Is Better Than Ever in Paul Schrader’s Tense Eco-Thriller

“I did get visited by Homeland Security this year because I posted something on Facebook about Donald Trump and the John Brown moment we are now in,” Schrader tells Variety. “So they came and visited me to ascertain whether I am a threat to the president’s life. I am not — except in theory.

Stephen Frears’ “Victoria & Abdul” is an otherwise benignly toothless, pleasantly glossy affair, but it does force us to confront one tricky question: When treating a subject as fraught as British imperial rule, when does a film’s benign inoffensiveness become offensive in and of itself? Still, that’s about the only food for thought in what is at once a breezy, lion-in-winter vehicle for Judi Dench in queen-mode and a “Lifestyles of the Rich and Noble” bit of wealth porn, and not much more.

Dench is back as Queen Victoria, returning to a role she had previously played in John Madden’s “Mrs. Brown,” a film that must have not only inspired Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall, but acted as their foundational text. Little is known about the very real relationship that existed between the aging monarch and her advisor Abdul Karim, and so Hall has essentially grafted their story...

PBS' 3-part, 3-hour American Experience film titled The Abolitionists, continues tonight with Part 2, after last Tuesday's broacast debut. The mini-series will finish off next week Tuesday, with Part 3, during its standard 9pm-10pm time slot. The film (which is a combo scripted/acted and documentary sequences) brings to life the epic struggles of the men and women who fought to end slavery, intertwining the stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Fighting body and soul, they led the most important civil rights crusade in American...

One of the new programs that will comprise the winter/spring season ahead for PBS, is a 3-part, 3-hour American Experience film titled The Abolitionists. Scheduled to air starting tonight, Tuesday, January 8th, and Tuesdays thereafter (the 15th, and 22nd), from 9pm-10pm, on each night, the film (which is a combo scripted/acted and documentary sequences) will bring to life the epic struggles of the men and women who fought to end slavery, intertwining the stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Fighting body and soul, they led the most important civil rights...

One of the new programs that will comprise the winter/spring season ahead for PBS, is a 3-part, 3-hour American Experience film titled The Abolitionists. Scheduled to air starting tomorrow, Tuesday, January 8th, and Tuesdays thereafter (the 15th, and 22nd), from 9pm-10pm, on each night, the film (which is a combo scripted/acted and documentary sequences) will bring to life the epic struggles of the men and women who fought to end slavery, intertwining the stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Fighting body and soul, they led the most important civil rights...

One of the new programs that will comprise the winter/spring season ahead for PBS, is a 3-part, 3-hour American Experience film titled The Abolitionists. Scheduled to air on Tuesdays, January 8, 15, and 22, from 9pm-10pm, on each night, the film (which is a combo scripted/acted and documentary sequences) will bring to life the epic struggles of the men and women who fought to end slavery, intertwining the stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Fighting body and soul, they led the most important civil rights crusade in American history. What began as a pacifist...

An exciting winter/spring season is ahead for PBS, including the return of fan faves like Downton Abbey; and lots of new original programming, including The Abolitionists, which brings to life the epic struggles of the men and women who fought to end slavery, intertwining the stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Also, look for documentary pick-ups like Soul Food Junkies, The Central Park Five, and 180 Days: Inside An American High School (all covered on S&A), and more. The full lineup follows below via press release from PBS: PBS Announces Winter/Spring 2013 Lineup - Including...

Capitalizing on the latest biopic of the sixteenth United States President with this month’s release of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Kino releases a mastered HD restoration of D.W. Griffith’s 1930 film, Abraham Lincoln. Serving as the silent film master’s official foray into sound, this serves as the conservative counterpart to Spielberg’s bearded game changer, with dueling depictions that couldn’t be more disparate in quality or content. Griffith’s film is regarded by many to be a poorly made endeavor, regardless of his renowned manifestations of blatant racism that are certainly present here, and Huston’s dowdy performance hardly rates next to the magnificent Daniel Day Lewis. But even if Spielberg’s log cabin abolitionist is more a portrait of the man we hope and wish Lincoln was, experiencing Griffith’s version serves to highlight not only how far we’ve come in the advancement of filmmaking,...

With Tony Gayton and Tom Brady (no, not the football superstar) writing "Purged Away With Blood" and Joe Gayton directing, this Hell on Wheels episode was clearly meant to be a pivotal turning point on Season 2.

With the show's creators at the helm, everything had to be great, right? Sort of. In plenty of respects, the sixth episode did do a lot well.

Tom Noonan gave an outstanding performance as the Reverend. Noonan has always done a solid job portraying the man through his drunk tirades, his crazy beheadings and general outlandish actions, despite the character teetering around in the background.

The episode put him front and center, eliminating his alcohol abuse, cranking up the crazy and revealing a menacingly determined character that was supremely underestimated. Whether he's glaring at Bohannon or breaking down in front of his daughter, Noonan is top notch.

Sadly, his death (was it the only way to stop him?...

Fan of MTV's "Death Valley"? You should be! The show's a lot of fun, and even better it's home to a lot of gore. We like gore. It makes us smile. So do these latest clips.

“Death Valley” stars Tania Raymonde (“Lost”), Bryan Callen (“The Hangover”), Caity Lotz (“Mad Men”), Bryce Johnson (‘Sleeping Dogs Lie”), Texas Battle (“Final Destination 3”, “Dragonball,” “Coach Carter”) and Charlie Sanders (Funny or Die’s “The Big Dog”). “Death Valley” is executive produced by Eric Weinberg, Austin Reading, Julie Kellman Reading and Tim Healy. Spider One is co-executive producer of the series. Tony Dibari is executive producer, MTV, and Matthew Parillo is MTV executive in charge of production.

Dig on the goods below courtesy of MTV.

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Discuss what the dead boys will do when sheriff John Brown comes for you in the comments section below!

Uma Thurman doing press for her new film Ceremony (Max Winkler) and when asked about the prospect of a third Kill Bill installment, she presented the following news:

I think he has a script ready to start of a new film, A Southern, I think it’s really exciting. It’s another new story and a fresh piece of material that he is channeling at the moment. So I think ‘Kill Bill’ lives down the road.”

This is the first a bit official confirmation that it is definitely the slavery-epic movie QuentinTarantino has been working on. Since 2007 he told the British press he was in the early stage of the project,

I want to explore something that really hasn’t been done. I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I...

Last month news of Quentin Tarantino’s 8th feature film started to leak in drips and drabs -

- first that it would be a Spaghetti Western titled The Angel, The Bad and The Wise (though that turned out to be a project he had hypthoised with Italian actor Franco Nero, likely for a Tarantino protege to direct) -

- then AICN confirmed he was indeed working on a Spaghetti Western, albeit a different one to the project above and that it would star Col Hans Landa himself Christoph Waltz in a major role -

- then Quentin confirmed to Deadline that his new script for a Western was just a few months away from being turned in at The Weinsteins and that it had ‘just flowed out of him’ and would probably shoot this year…

- and then it was rumoured the movie would be his long talked about...