‘Smile’ Review: The Demons Grin Back at You in a Horror Movie With a Highly Effective Creep Factor

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If, like me, you consider “All the President’s Men” to be one of the most exciting movies ever made, it’s remarkable to consider that it came out in 1976, just four years after the Watergate break-in. The saga of Richard Nixon’s corruption and downfall had saturated the culture, yet every moment in “All the President’s Men” tingled with discovery. That’s why it’s a film you can watch again and again. When a big-screen journalistic drama gets built around a news story that epic, it needs to give you a version of that feeling. “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning 2015 drama about The Boston Globe’s unraveling of the child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, wasn’t as great as “All the President’s Men,” yet it, too, was laced with a sense of discovery. It’s there in how the film anatomized not just the horrific behavior of abusive priests but the omertà of the Church.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The “Halloween” series, which comes to an end this weekend (and if you believe that, I have a set of very rusty kitchen knives I’d like to sell you), has always been the least pretentious of horror franchises. A towering killer in a rubber mask pops out of the shadows to slash one victim after the next. Horror doesn’t get much more basic than that. But, of course, the “Halloween” series has always had a pretentious side too — the side that began with Donald Pleasance droning on about eee-vil, and the side that has extended, over the latest trilogy, to the top-heavy handwringing of Laurie Strode’s self-actualized guilt and despair. As for Michael Myers, who started out as a small-town killer, he has been turned, more and more explicitly, into A Force Larger Than Himself. And in “Halloween Ends,” that trend now culminates in a movie where Michael, in a certain way, is barely in the movie; he’s the film’s totem, its mascot, its looming emblem of evil. “Halloween Ends” doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Nuclear,” his intensely compelling, must-see documentary, Oliver Stone makes the vital and historical case that nuclear power has been the victim of a perception/reality conundrum, one that is now in the process of being overturned. The perception is that nuclear power is dangerous: too dangerous to be an essential component of providing our energy needs. The reality, argues Stone, is that nuclear power is clean, abundant, and safe. “Nuclear” says that the ominous reality of our energy crisis — the looming catastrophe of climate change, the hopeful yet stubbornly incremental growth of renewables like wind and solar — is too urgent for nuclear power not to be an essential component of providing our energy needs.

Terrific news for fans of Outlander: Several favorites from seasons past will rejoin the action in the seventh season of the Starz drama that’s now filming in Scotland. Graham McTavish — who’s on HBO’s House of the Dragon — will reprise his role as Jamie’s uncle Dougal MacKenzie. Also returning is Nell Hudson as Laoghaire Fraser; Steven Cree as Old Ian Murray; Andrew Whipp as Brian Fraser, Jamie’s father; Layla Burns as Joan MacKimmie, Marsali’s sister and Jamie’s stepdaughter; and Lotte Verbeek as Geillis Duncan, Claire’s former friend-turned-enemy and a fellow time traveler. Several new actors will be joining the cast too, including Gloria Obianyo (Dune) as Mercy Woodcock, a free Black woman navigating the hardships of life in Colonial America; Rod Hallett (The Last Kingdom) as Benedict Arnold, the notorious Revolutionary soldier turned traitor; Chris Fulton (Bridgerton) as Rob Cameron, a new acquaintance of Roger and Brianna; Diarmaid Murtagh (Vikings) as Buck MacKenzie, the illegitimate son of Dougal MacKenzie and Geillis Duncan, and Roger’s ancestor, a role previously played by Graham McTavish in season five, and Kristin Atherton (Shakespeare & Hathaway) as Jenny Murray, Jamie’s sister and Young Ian’s mother, a role originated by Laura Donnelly in seasons one through three. Previously announced additions include Charles Vandervaart as William Ransom; Izzy Meikle-Small as Rachel Hunter and Joey Phillips as Denzell Hunter.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” Elvis Mitchell’s highly pleasurable and eye-opening movie-love documentary about the American Black cinema revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s, Billy Dee Williams, now 85 but still spry, tells a funny story about what it was like to play Louis McKay, the dapper love object and would-be savior of Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues.” The year was 1972, and African-American audiences had rarely (if ever) been given the chance to gawk at a movie star of color who was not just this sexy but this showcased for his sexiness. Louis was like Clark Gable with a dash of Marvin Gaye; when he was on that promenade stairway, Williams says that he just about fell in love with himself. That’s how unprecedented the whole thing was. The actor recalls how the lighting was fussed over (we see a shot in which Louis appears bathed in an old-movie glow), and how unreal that was to him on the set. At the time, Black actors didn’t get lighting like that. But Black audiences drank it in with a better-late-than-never swoon, even as they knew that this was a representation they’d been denied for more than half a century.

J. Kim Murphy There’s one key question gripping the world this weekend: will the box office be smiling, or will it be Lyling? Sony’s “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” had hopes to challenge for the top slot at the box office this weekend, though it seems that the family comedy won’t be able to outpace the second weekend of Paramount’s smash horror film “Smile.” Meanwhile, 20th Century Studios’ “Amsterdam” is bombing in its debut, aiming to finish in third. “Lyle, Lyle” landed a $3.47 million opening day, screening in 4,350 locations. While that’s not exactly the most impressive opening day on paper, the majority of ticket sales for the musical will come with family audiences attending screenings on Saturday, Sunday and the Monday holiday of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which will keep a good fraction of kids out of school.

Dan Harmon is sharing some updates about the recently announced Community movie.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The movie format where a character beloved by kids becomes a CGI creature, who is then plugged into a live-action universe, is one of the most casually technically astonishing of all popcorn genres — and, as often as not, one of the most stunted. It almost doesn’t matter if the hero is Garfield or Stuart Little, Alvin and the Chipmunks or Sonic the Hedgehog: The way this genre has descended from the noisy bravura of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the actors tend to be reduced to one-note stooges who get stuck in too many green-screen reaction shots, whereas the critter at the center — the animated star — is, almost inevitably, a preening chatterbox who wears out his welcome by pelting the live-action players, and the audience, with too many bad punchlines.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Every horror movie is about pain, but only the “Hellraiser” series is about sadomasochism — the electricity and agony of it, the higher calling of it. “Hellraiser,” a reboot of the franchise that began in 1987 and has given us nine sequels (time flies when you’re having fun imagining yourself being tortured for fun), is a movie that honors the subversive tug of Clive Barker’s 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart.” But it takes a long time for the new “Hellraiser” to get to what devotees of the series would call the good stuff. When it does, however, the movie doesn’t hold back. Flesh is torn and frayed, flesh is peeled and sliced, flesh gets split wide open with mystical mechanical devices. The film’s brutal final act may put you in mind of such queasy landmarks of cinematic mutilation as “Audition,” “The Cell,” the “Saw” series, the 2018 remake of “Suspiria,” and David Cronenberg’s recent return to body horror “Crimes of the Future.”

Smile has received rave first reactions on social media from fans.Written and directed by debut filmmaker Parker Finn, Smile follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who, after witnessing a traumatic incident involving a patient, starts to experience terrifying and inexplainable occurrences.Alongside Bacon, the cast also includes The Boys star Jessie T.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial” sounds like the tawdriest of TV-movies, with any vestige of shame left on the cutting-room floor. It definitely is that, yet it’s worth noting that this exact sort thing has been around for decades. It just didn’t used to come off the assembly line quite so quickly. In the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the landscape was littered with made-for-TV movies that jumped on tabloid-ready stories — The Jacksons! Jim Jones! The Menendez brothers! The Beverly Hills madam! The rape of Richard Beck! — and squeezed out whatever juice was left in them. “Hot Take” isn’t much different. It feeds on our collective desire, which is apparently limitless, to see adequate-but-not-never-good-enough actors acting out the infamous scenes we’ve read or heard about, bringing those squalid episodes to life. Except that the whole problem with this form is that the dramatized version rarely ends up looking half as real as what was in our imaginations.

J. Kim Murphy “Smile” has something grin about this weekend. The creeper is projected to land a $19 million debut from 3,645 locations. It’s a fantastic start for the genre film, which carries a modest $17 million production budget. Compared to other original horror entries this year, Universal’s supernatural kidnap thriller “The Black Phone” kicked off with $23 million while 20th Century Studios’ “Barbarian” opened to $10 million. “Smile” landed a mildly positive “B-” grade through research firm Cinema Score, though such a figure is standard for a horror release. The film has drawn good buzz with solid reviews, scoring a 79% from top critics on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. Variety‘s chief film critic Owen Gleiberman praised the film in his review, writing that it “sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits.”

Movie lovers, your time has come! Own a piece of cinematic history — from such iconic films as Star Wars, Superman, The Shawshank Redemption, Friday the 13th and more — by bidding in Propstore’s upcoming auction that is selling all of your favorite memorabilia.

, the movie based on the Jessica Knoll's novel of the same name, premiered in theaters Friday, and readers of the book are already weighing in on the big differences between the book and the film.Starring Mila Kunis, the film tells the story of TifAni «Ani» FaNelli, a New York woman who appears to have it all, from the sought-after job at a glossy magazine to the dream Nantucket wedding. Ani's perfect life is threatened when a crime documentary director interviews her about a «shocking incident» that took place at her prestigious high school when she was a teenager.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “The Munsters,” the director Rob Zombie makes a game attempt to pass off his amateurishness as attitude. It’s like watching a Tim Burton film with the cheekiness turned up to 11 and the film technique dialed down to 2. Yet “The Munsters,” the family-of-ghouls ’60s sitcom that Zombie is adapting, was such a ticky-tacky piece of gothic bat-house surrealism that the movie, broad and slovenly as it is, works more than it doesn’t. The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way. “The Munsters” debuted in 1964, in the middle of the age of theater-of-the-absurd American sitcoms, yet the show, if anything, was less corny, less obvious, and lighter on its feet than this overstuffed update/reboot, with its Famous Monsters of Filmland cameos and contempo catch phrases. Instead of taking all his cues from the show, Zombie, who wrote the script (you can feel his joy in giving Herman the groan-worthy vaudeville one-liners he delivers as if they were gems), has dreamed up the Munsters’ origin story. (As if anyone was asking for that.) It’s all about how Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie), a maiden vampire with two-tone hair and an undead glow, living with her vampire dad The Count (Daniel Roebuck) in a Transylvania castle of psychedelic chintz, recovers from her life of bad dates with bad monsters — we see one with Orlock, the rat-man bloodsucker of “Nosferatu,” played by Richard Brake as the cuddliest of creeps.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic We live in an age when all kinds of behavior that was once not thought of as scandalous is now scandalous. Yet the mentality of “calling people out” can extend to less serious and sometimes even trivial things. That’s been the drama of “Don’t Worry Darling” — and by drama, I don’t mean the story of a Stepford housewife, played by Florence Pugh, who wakes up to discover that the candy-colored ’50s dreamworld she’s been living in is a carefully constructed nightmare. That drama, as I wrote in my review, is just okay; it starts enticingly and then loses steam. But the offscreen drama? That’s been a gift of gossip that keeps on giving. (If you want to know what Neil Postman meant by the title of his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” look no further than Spitgate.)

The upcoming True Detective: Night Country is adding new stars to the cast!

Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest are celebrating their five-year work anniversary! The hosts spoke to ET’s Rachel Smith about the milestone.  “It seems like not five years,” Ripa says.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’re someone who considers themself a foodie (and I totally am), chances are there was a moment in the last few years when you had The Awakening. It may have been when the waiter was describing the veal marrow with beat foam served with baby lettuces from New Zealand. It may have been when you were eating the red snapper that was cooked halfway through, like a rare steak, and you thought, “I love sushi, I love cooked fish, but I’m not sure this is really the best of both worlds.” It may have been when you saw the bill. Whatever the trigger, that was the moment you looked up from your plate and realized that high-end foodie culture has become a serious annoyance. It’s gotten too fussy, too pricey, too full of itself, too not filling (of yourself), too avant-garde and conceptual, too tied to The Salvation of the Planet, too much of an ordeal. Did I mention too pricey? It used to be that if you wanted to ridicule culinary mania, you mocked someone like Guy Fieri. But he has risen from the ashes of infamy to a kind of born-again respectability (and yes, “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” was always a great show). Now, if you want to ridicule culinary mania, the most natural targets are restaurants like The French Laundry in Napa Valley or Bros’ in Southern Italy, places where the 12-course “tasting menu” can inspire you to think, as one blogger put it, that “there was nothing even close to an actual meal served.”