In a certain way, she put a turkey in puff pastry so that you didn’t have to (but could dream about it as if you were the one who’d done it). She turned "homemaking" into a so-real-you-could-touch-it-and-taste-it hologram.

Tom Hardy, from the first "Venom" on, has chosen to offset the uncoolness of doing a comic-book franchise by putting his slumming in quotation marks, playing Eddie as a borderline doofus who talks like a grown-up version of one of the Bowery Boys. The performance has worked, in a certain way, because it kept the whole series light. But it has also ensured that the "Venom" movies are a lark and nothing more, geared to the arrested pleasure centers of fanboys: the more snark and CGI the better.

What "Woman of the Hour" is going for isn’t some ultimate period-piece authenticity. It’s trying to deconstruct television, along with the male aggression that can descend into violence, and to show you how they work together.

"Smile 2" is a flash-cut horror parable, but the story it’s telling is that pop fame makes you crazy. Though the movie is hardly subtle, Parker Finn has become a clever enough filmmaker to make reality feel like a hallucination and hallucinations feel like reality.  

The very premise of "Suburban Fury," with Moore, during the interviews, posed in ironic period backdrops like the rear seat of a '70s station wagon, makes her seem a classic performative personality — a woman who descended into the darkness out of a need for attention. What’s odd about "Suburban Fury," even as it holds you with rapt authority, is that the film’s point-of-view is so limited to Sara Jane Moore’s rationalization of her own life that the movie seems, by the end, almost flirts with endorsing her defense of her actions: that she tried to kill the president as a skewed trigger for social justice.

In May, after I saw and reviewed the how-Donald-Trump-learned-to-be-Donald-Trump biopic “The Apprentice” at the Cannes Film Festival, I had dinner with a group of very sharp-minded film folks, and we all agreed that the movie, if treated with the right marketing savvy, had the potential to make a splash. A few days later, I woke […]