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 […]

If they gave out an Academy Award for best performance by a silent harlequin in a white clown suit who can mime a giggle fit while slicing people’s faces off (don’t try this at home — the slicing or the silent laughing), the award would be a lock for Art the Clown, the mascot of beyond-anything-you’ve-ever-seen slasher mayhem who’s the depraved mascot/killer of "Terrifier 3." Art the Clown is to Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers what the Sex Pistols were to the Who and the Stones: their scandalous culmination, their punk end point.

What may take you by surprise, if you’re a McQueen fan, is what a shockingly conventional and middle-of-the-road ersatz-Hollywood movie it is. Taken on its own terms, "Blitz" is well done, yet it could almost be a middlebrow Barry Levinson Oscar-bait movie from 1992.

Given her relative youth, we expect a story of ferocity and grit, of the unstoppable rise of a boxer who turns out to be piston-pounding dynamo. "The Fire Inside" gives us all that; it’s a real rouser. Yet it’s rooted in a galvanizing feeling for the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph.

Donald Trump, as dark and threatening as his second presidency would be to this country, has never stopped acting like the politician as walking TV show — a reality-based character who is really, in his way, an entire series, because he carries so much drama around with him. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we […]

The music gives the film shape and propulsion. But so does the way that Macdonald, keying off Lennon’s TV habit, presents images of the period as an ongoing channel-surfing montage.