What’s On TV Thursday (original) (raw)
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- Aug. 13, 2015
1:20 P.M. (Starz Cinema) THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (2013) A young actress (Felicity Jones, above with John Kavanagh) becomes the clandestine lover of Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) in this recounting of Dickens’s longtime affair with Nelly Ternan, who was 18 to his 45 when they met. Mr. Fiennes also directed the film, which was written by Abi Morgan (“The Iron Lady,” “Shame”). “You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of ‘The Invisible Woman’ and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times, adding, “Ms. Jones gives a performance of extraordinary subtlety and delicacy.” And Mr. Fiennes “gives his warmest, most full-bodied screen performance as Dickens, an irresistibly charismatic, tirelessly energetic celebrity who was the life of every party he attended.”
6 A.M. (IFC) RUN, FAT BOY, RUN (2008) A huffing and puffing security guard (Simon Pegg, left) enters the same marathon as the rich American boyfriend (Hank Azaria) of his former fiancée (Thandie Newton), whom he abandoned, pregnant, on their wedding day. He wants to prove to her and to their son that he can see a plan through. “ ‘Run, Fat Boy, Run’ is the kind of movie that’s apt to be dismissed as a goofy lark,” Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in The Times. “It is that. But it’s also a rare comedy that believes in its own message, and that could inspire the depressed and the demoralized to grit their teeth and keep running.” In “The Truth About Charlie” (2002), Jonathan Demme’s remake of the 1963 comic thriller “Charade,” at 6 on HBO Signature, Ms. Newton plays a new wife who returns to her Paris apartment to break it off with her art-dealing husband, Charlie, only to find the place ransacked. She soon discovers that nothing is as it seems. Mark Wahlberg portrays the charming stranger eager to help; Tim Robbins is the man she turns to at the United States Embassy. “The sensual, butter-voiced” Ms. Newton is “so good that when she’s on screen, the movie works — or at least you think it does,” Elvis Mitchell wrote in The Times. “It’s a spot-specific case of alchemy.”
5 P.M. (FX) FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS (2011) Dylan and Jamie (Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, right), New York singles with battered hearts and eager bodies — she’s a corporate headhunter, and he’s the art director she places at a men’s magazine — try to keep things light in this “breezy, speedy and (no kidding) funny comedy” about “love and sex in the age of social networking,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times. The director, Will Gluck, “doesn’t just want to have his romantic comedy cake and eat it too, he also wants to throw it in your face and make you laugh as you lick the icing off your lips,” she added. “The results are about as naughty as that sounds (not very), but it also makes for a fairly giggling good time.” In “Runner Runner” (2013), at 9 on MoreMax, Richie Furst (Mr. Timberlake), a Princeton graduate student and former Wall Streeter, flies down to Costa Rica to confront Ivan Block (Ben Affleck), the owner of the Internet poker site where he gambled away his tuition money, after he detects evidence of cheating. So Ivan, naturally, hires Richie as a consultant. Enter Champagne, fat stacks of cash, strippers, speedboats, sports cars and Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), Ivan’s business partner — “everything I thought I wanted when I was 13 years old,” says Ivan, who seems to believe he now has more mature pursuits in mind. “ ‘Runner Runner’ has no such illusions,” A. O. Scott wrote of this film, directed by Brad Furman, in The Times.
8 P.M. (ABC) THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB The NASA career of Wally Schirra (Aaron McCusker) ends, forcing his wife, Jo (Zoe Boyle), to redefine herself. Louise (Dominique McElligott), meanwhile, confronts the fear of losing her husband, Alan Shepard (Desmond Harrington), to risky surgery.
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