In the over 200-year history of the United States, many monumental events have rocked the nation. One of which was an unfortunate one called slavery and it existed well after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued. After Lincoln’s executive order was passed, slavery was hit hard but it wasn’t completely gone. PBS’ documentary Slavery by Another Name explores slavery and its existence after the Civil War.

Narrated by Laurence Fishburne, Slavery by Another Name is a powerful and gripping documentary which sheds light on one of America’s darkest chapters in history. The film is based upon Douglas A. Blackmon’s book of the same name and it is a riveting program. Mostly innocent African-American men usually in the South would be arrested and forced into involuntary servitude. The legal practices of United States were seriously flawed and this documentary chronicles this terrible time.

Even as Young Justice, the newest animated series based in DC’s Justice League lore, continues to improve with each episode, it becomes clear that it will likely never reach the same level as Batman: The Animated Series or Justice League. However, it makes sense. The relationships in Young Justice lack the same maturity and depth that Justice League pulled from, and like the enemies, the heroes feel like knock-offs of the originals more than characters unto themselves. It helps that the adults are no longer looming over the youngin’s as much as before, because it now gives the stories a sense of danger, but it also stops constantly reminding us that these aren’t the A-Listers. This is the seventh string whose problems include blending in at high school and fighting off the bad guys without leading them to their safe haven. There’s still more character development here than in most cartoons, and for that we should be grateful, but Young Justice still has a ways to go – both as a show and a fighting force.

The story of Frank Abegnale Jr., the US’s most accomplished conman, went on to become Catch Me If You Can, a popular film starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DeCaprio and a Broadway musical. It’s only fair then that Marcelo da Rocha, one of Brazil’s most prodigious con men, should get a film based on his life. However, Catch Me If You Can delves less into the compulsion that pushes Frank to keep scamming, VIPs takes the element heavily into consideration. It gives the film a much sharper emotional edge, and Wagner Moura’s turn as Marcelo helps to push the story with substantial character development. As he adopts new personae to keep ahead of the authorities who begin to notice his face popping up under different names, is he running for his own sake and the identity crisis his father left him with? Or is he running to provide his mother with money and a sense of pride? It may resemble the US film in plot, but VIPs is a much more mindful film.

There’s not a single other show in the history of television that has had as sporadic a run as The Comic Strip Presents.... It ran for five seasons: from 1982-1984 (two seasons), 1988, 1990, and 1993. In between those seasons, a series of TV specials and theatrical releases peppered the public consciousness keeping the show in mind, even as the stars that made it famous went on to wild success in shows of their own. At the heart of the show you’d find Adrian Emondson, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Peter Richardson, Jennifer Saunders, and Nigel Planer, though later on it was increasingly common for only a few of them to appear with recognizable faces such as Jim Broadbent, Miranda Richardson, Robbie Coltrane,  and others as guests. The Comic Strip Presents... wasn’t your typical comedy show; it didn’t skip from one skit to the next, it didn’t have the same characters from one episode to the next, and you never knew what you were going to get. It was and is a unique program that finally gets a suitable US DVD release.

Though The Descendants is about a father and his two daughters dealing with the affairs of the family’s dying matriarch, there’s no doubt that the film is just an acting showcase for George Clooney. To that effect, The Descendants can’t even be considered his best work since it requires very little of him, and the effect of his in-film acting combined with his narration negates the emotional heft that should come from a character-driven piece about a husband coming to terms with what his wife’s death means. The themes are strong and end up surpassing any other element of the film; they amount to a story about how well or poorly you can know someone that you share a home with, but where the characters could have been played by anyone and they’d be just as memorable.

Bill Clinton’s presidency, with all of its successes, failures, joys, and shames, happened, and whether those across the aisle would like to admit it, was ultimately beneficial to the American economy. However, its impact on the American perception of politics and the men and women who make that machine go ‘round and ‘round was harmful. Slick Willy might have excelled at climbing out of the holes he dug for himself, but in so doing, and as often as he did, he left Americans with the lasting impression that US politics are broken. PBS’s American Experience examines Bill Clinton’s life from his childhood in Arkansas, to his years at Yale and Oxford, and the entire run of his political career in a 2-part, 4-hour documentary that dissects the man, scrutinizes his record, and questions the lasting impact of his time in office.

When adapting a bestselling book to film directors and screenwriters always run the risk of disappointing the readership they hope to sell tickets to. However, an even greater pitfall, as Director Stephen Daldry should learn, is manipulating a tragic event or staging your adaptation as nothing more than an audiobook with moving pictures. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close could have been a powerful film, but so many things went wrong that it baffles the mind. Nevermind that the story pivots around September 11^th and eventually throws it in the audience’s face with manipulative and cloying images of people falling from buildings, the fact that it’s barely a film at all but really just a voiceover by obnoxious child actor Thomas Horn makes having to watch him unnecessary. People would genuinely be better off buying the audiobook and hearing it that way. It’s about 90% the same experience as sitting through the film, and the 10% that separates them is acting you don’t want to see anyways.

It seems as though writer-director William Monahan read a book titled Gangster Movies for Dummies before setting out to make London Boulevard. Then again, Monahan could probably write such a book himself, given that he is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. Nonetheless, London Boulevard is a pale shadow of that film, tinged with the grey fog of Britain rather than Boston, and though one might argue it’s unfair to compare the two, it’s impossible not to do so. It is also impossible not to compare London Boulevard to the many other British gangster dramas that have been made over the years, and to see how it comes up short to nearly all of film.

It’s always fun to go back to B-movie creature features from the 80s to see how filmmakers used to do monsters and gore when they couldn’t just paste them in later with After Effects. Some of that good old fashioned filmmaking goes on today, but it’s hard to pull it off without feeling hokey or overly reverential and derivative. There’s just no substitute for the real thing, and that’s what makes The Deadly Spawn so fun: bad acting, good old rubber monsters, and pools of blood. Unfortunately, it’s the former the entire time, and the latter two for only about 15-minutes. And that 15 minutes is broken up between ridiculously drawn out scenes that don’t really add to a story, just the runtime. The Deadly Spawn could have been cut down to 30 minutes and it would be a sharper, and still equally satisfying film as long as half of that time was the aliens and gore. As it stands, it’s an 80s piece of nostalgia that reminds you how fun films like this were, and then disappoints you by short changing the right parts.

Thomas Hardy’s naturalist novel Far From the Madding Crowd runs rampant through the fields of unrequited love and fierce feminine independence. It turns the tables on all the conventions of normal literature of its era, stripping the power and decisions from the men and putting it in the hands of a newly empowered heroine who proves that neither sex is any better at making important life decisions—whether for better or for worse. PBS’s 1998 television adaptation puts Paloma Baeza into the role of the strong-willed Bathsheba, with Nathaniel Parker as Gabriel Oak, the farmer whose fortunes take a turn for the worse just after Bathsheba rejects his proposal. What follows is a slow, but well-paced story of love and consequences that starts sweet and ends in moving tragedy.