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

A new report from Puck this week alleges that Bill Murray has paid a $100,000 settlement to a “much younger” female crew member on the film Being Mortal, the production of which Deadline first reported in April was being suspended due to a complaint made against Murray for inappropriate behavior.

The Today Show's Hoda Kotb reportedly broke down in tears on Friday as she hosted a special event at BravoCon.MORE: Hoda Kotb talks difficult career goodbyes with Today co-starThe 58-year-old was said to be seen wiping away tears during the event with Savannah Guthrie after audience member took to the stage and shared a heartbreaking story of how her daughter died in a drink driving accident.WATCH: The Today show crew become the Real Anchors in fun segment immitating the Real Housewives"Several years ago, I lost my daughter in a drunk driving crash. I don’t sleep very well, but your shows have sustained me," she told the network hosts, according to The Sun.Hoda then gave the mom a big hug as Andy Cohen, whom Hoda and Savannah were interviewing, signed the mom's book.MORE: Jenna Bush Hager shares heartfelt message to Today co-star Savannah GuthrieMORE: Savannah Guthrie shares glamorous new selfie from backstage at TodayThe two Today stars moderated the "Ask Andy" panel during Bravo's three-day fan convention in New York.

published Friday by ET Online, credited his longevity to a force of will that led him to take risks that paid off. One of those risks was the hosting job on “Saturday Night Live,” a gig he said several people close to him advised him not to take.“If you want to do it a long time, be prepared to be brave and say ‘Yes’ to things that maybe other people in your life are going to be worried about,” Lowe, 58, advised to up-and-coming actors and other TV and film artists. “I mean, I had people in my life telling me not to host ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I know today it seems like everybody does it, but there was a time when people were like, ‘I don’t know.

“She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” Kevin Feige is actually K.E.V.I.N., an artificial intelligence bot. The show wasn’t always planned to end that way, though.In the episode, now streaming on Disney+, we find Jennifer Walters back at Emil Blonsky’s retreat, hoping to escape from the havoc that Intelligencia wreaked on her life. As it turns out, Intelligencia is having their own retreat at the lodge, with Abomination as a guest speaker.

Lea Michele and Tovah Feldshuh have been starring on Broadway in Funny Girl for the past month and they’ve been getting rave reviews for their performances!

Lisa Rinna is opening up about the booing she received at BravoCon.

Victoria Beckham steps out in two more fashionable looks in New York City to cap off her week on Friday (October 14).

Lily Collins is teasing a dreamy and dramatic third season of her hit Netflix series, “Emily in Paris”.

Weighing in. Southern Charm personality Marcie Hobbs shared her thoughts on Taylor Ann Green’s comments about how Shep Rose treats his parents.

Back to his roots. Big Brother alum Joseph Abdin finally returned to his home state of Florida after spending several weeks in L.A. with the winner of his season, Taylor Hale, after the September finale.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Arcade Fire is having trouble keeping name acts in the opening slots for its arena tours. Beck has now dropped out of his position as the opener for the group’s U.S. tour, without any explanation so far. In an email sent to ticket buyers, Beck was described only as “unfortunately no longer able to join Arcade Fire on their upcoming North American tour. Taking his place will be Boukman Eksperyans,” described as a Grammy-nominated Haitian roots band. Contacted by Variety, Beck’s reps declined to comment on his bowing out. The move was not necessarily a surprise, as fans had already been speculating whether the singer-songwriter might exit the Arcade Fire outing, after Win Butler was accused of sexual misconduct in an August Pitchfork article. Feist dropped out of her opening slot on the European leg of the tour after playing just the first two dates.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Assemble Media, a literary incubator which concurrently develops its book projects for film and TV adaptation, has sold five new titles to major publishers. Founded by by director and producer Jack Heller, the round of sales includes “Eat Post Like” (to Avon, division of HarperCollins), “Promposal” (to Joy Revolution, an imprint of Delacorte at Penguin Random House), “The Wayside,” “The Light Between Sirens,” and “The Girls From Hush Cabin” (to Blackstone Publishing).  All of Assemble’s intellectual property and book concepts are developed in-house then packaged with writers and shopped to publishers. Heller’s team includes Caitlin de Lisser-Ellen and Steven Salpeter, president of literary and IP development.“The original concepts that come to life from the collaboration of our Assemble team and brilliant writers truly showcase the ingenuity and boldness of those behind the scenes,” said Heller. “We have been extremely lucky to work alongside inspiring individuals and  love watching these projects develop.”The company has served as producers on films like Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain. They also recently sold “Instafamous” to MGM and Orion TV, an original Assemble Media concept written by Alexis Nedd. It was included in the first issue of their Blackstone-published short story publication Assemble Artifacts. Read a brief synopsis of each project: “Eat Post Like” by Emily Arden Wells: Pitched as “Emily in Paris” meets “Eat Pray Love,” the story follows a woman who discovers her newly deceased-boyfriend is behind one of the most popular food critic social media accounts. She decides to take his place on a tour around the world to discover great meals and herself.

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.”

“Smile,” which stars Sosie Bacon and Kyle Gallner and just had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin before opening this Friday (September 30), is super creepy and unsettling.But how do you watch the new movie? Read on to find out:“Smile” is, at present, exclusively playing in movie theaters. This is honestly probably a good thing, as its effectiveness is directly related to the amount of teenagers screaming and throwing their popcorn around you. This is a real matinee-at-the-mall movie, in the best possible way.Paramount+ is pretty slippery when it comes to when its movies are hitting the service.

“Smile” is ready to give you the willies.The new original horror film, from first-time writer/director Parker Finn, is here just in time for spooky season and it doesn’t disappoint – this thing is scary, disturbing and, yes, downright haunting. It follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), whose patient kills herself in front of Rose while wearing a ghastly smile on her face.

Written and directed by Parker Finn, Smile personifies trauma and examines its ripple effect and how it connects people, places, and things. The film stars Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, and Kyle Gallner.

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.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

There might be a box office surprise this weekend in Paramount’s horror movie Smile.

Sosie Bacon gets in the middle of a big cast picture at the premiere of their new movie, Smile, during the 2022 Beyond Fest at the Aero Theatre on Tuesday night (September 27) in Santa Monica, Calif.

that, not to go in there, and just generally not, for the love of god. Even a hardened horror fan can easily get swept up in the tension of “Smile.”“Smile” stars Sosie Bacon (“Mare of Easttown”) as Rose Cotter, a therapist working at a hospital that treats people in severe emotional distress.

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.)

Sosie Bacon is celebrating the premiere of her new movie!