"Absolution" wants to be more than a dumb action film. Neeson takes you part of the way there, but in its atmospheric way the movie is cobbled together out of so many standard yet disparate devices that it can feel as pumped-up as the cliché thriller it’s trying not to be.

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 […]