Natascha Mcelhone

On television, she plays the steady hand in a show about unsteady people, the muse to David Duchovny's tortured-writer protagonist in Showtime's saucy Sunday night series "Californication." She's also played apple to the eyes of Anthony Hopkins in "Surviving Picasso," Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show" and George Clooney in "Solaris."

SERIES Brothers: Snoop Dogg guest stars in this new episode (7 p.m. Fox). Shatner's Raw Nerve: Henry Winkler sits down with his fellow classic TV star (7 p.m. Biography). Tony Danza is Shatner's guest in a second new episode (7:30 p.m.). Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: Mary J. Blige joins Ty Pennington and the team rebuilding a home for a strong-willed woman with a degenerative muscular disease who runs a nonprofit youth development and family center from her home (8 p.m. ABC)

SERIES Brothers: Snoop Dogg guest stars in this new episode (7 p.m. Fox). Shatner's Raw Nerve: Henry Winkler sits down with his fellow classic TV star (7 p.m. Biography). Tony Danza is Shatner's guest in a second new episode (7:30 p.m.). Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: Mary J. Blige joins Ty Pennington and the team rebuilding a home for a strong-willed woman with a degenerative muscular disease who runs a nonprofit youth development and family center from her home (8 p.m. ABC)

On television, she plays the steady hand in a show about unsteady people, the muse to David Duchovny's tortured-writer protagonist in Showtime's saucy Sunday night series "Californication." She's also played apple to the eyes of Anthony Hopkins in "Surviving Picasso," Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show" and George Clooney in "Solaris."

An appeals board has overturned the R rating given Steven Soderbergh's romantic outer-space drama, "Solaris," and the film will now carry a less restrictive PG-13 rating, 20th Century Fox confirmed Thursday. The Motion Picture Assn. of America initially had rated the film R for "some sexuality/nudity," objecting to two scenes depicting actor George Clooney's naked backside. The director vowed to appeal.

UNDERRATED Depeche Mode: Between the absurd-in-hindsight "riot" at the Beverly Center in 1990 and last month's free concert on Hollywood Boulevard, the English synth-pop band has been L.A.'s house band of sorts for going on two decades. Now they're back with a new record and two nights at the Bowl this summer, but the real surprise is how good they still sound after so many years. Guitar bands may age, but electronics are forever.

Director Steven Soderbergh vowed Monday to appeal a restrictive R rating the Motion Picture Assn. of America has assigned to his outer-space romantic drama, "Solaris," for "some sexuality/nudity." Two scenes depict actor George Clooney's naked backside. "We all agreed that we are not going to cut the film," Soderbergh said, referring to executives at 20th Century Fox, which plans to open the movie Nov. 27.

Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction writer whose novel "Solaris" was made into a movie starring George Clooney, died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84. Lem died in a Krakow hospital from heart failure "connected to his old age," the secretary, Wojciech Zemek, told the Associated Press. Lem was one of the most popular science fiction authors of recent decades to write in a language other than English, and his works were translated into more than 40 languages.

Writing musical theater was not an option for William Shakespeare, but Kenneth Branagh hasn't let that trouble him. He's turned Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" into a 1930s-style romantic musical comedy, garnished with retro dance numbers and classic songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and George and Ira Gershwin. It ought to be delightful, but it isn't. For while the idea is a charming one, in execution "Love's Labour's Lost" feels clumsy and jerry-built.

They're tense and intense, been there and been around, world-weary and drop-dead professional. They're five hard men with implacable faces and murky pasts brought together to do a dirty job they don't even pretend to understand. If their story sounds familiar, that turns out to be a very good thing. "Ronin," directed by John Frankenheimer from a script that David Mamet had a noticeable hand in, is an old-fashioned thriller brought efficiently up to date.

As an artist and a personality, Pablo Picasso resembled the Hindu god Shiva, "the destroyer of worlds," intent on outraging orthodoxy and defying tradition whenever possible. So it's ironic and even amusing to watch as "Surviving Picasso" turns his life into a genteel, well-behaved, even conventional piece of filmmaking.

David Morrissey, a good-looking big lug of a British leading man with a talent for playing tortured rectitude, is the star and producer of "Thorne," a detective drama airing Tuesday and Wednesday on Encore. The series, to stretch the term - it ran in six parts in the U.K. in 2010, but here takes the form of back-to-back feature films - adapts two novels by Mark Billingham, "Thorne: Sleepyhead" and "Thorne: Scaredy Cat," both of which concern apparent serial murders. Its visual tics seem imported from American procedurals like"CSI,"and if they make "Thorne" seem contemporary and excite its surface, they can also obscure whatever human story they have to tell; you can't see the grit for the gloss.