Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party,
directed by Dinesh D'Souza
(PG-13, 100 minutes)
This is a poorly made, aesthetically empty, historically dubious rant against the Democratic Party's presidential candidate that relies on re-enactments of questionable history and the co-director's prison experience.
If you don't like Hillary Clinton, you'll find a lot here to give you comfort, but there's no way any intellectually honest critic could make the case that it's a good movie. So see this if you want to. Or if you want something to get outraged about. Just don't pretend it's a good movie. It's not.
What Dinesh D'Souza seems to want to be is a right-wing Michael Moore. He obviously models his on-screen persona on Moore's faux-amazed naif. He employs the same sort of wheedling, fake naivete. He has the same habit of extrapolating general conditions from a single, perhaps extraordinary case. He exhibits the same prosecutorial arrangement of facts.
But he does so without any of Moore's filmic intelligence or humanity and without a trace of Moore's empathy for those he considers his ideological enemies. This is a movie within a thesis that sounds like a collaboration between William Castle and John Birch: What if the goal of the Democratic Party is to steal the most valuable thing this world ever produced? Which is America.
D'Souza started out as an interesting if not always fair-minded writer, an obviously intelligent advocate for post-racial neoconservatism. Over 25 years or so, he has devolved into a downmarket propagandist, willing to manipulate at a lowest common denominator level. This -- and his previous films -- are cynical (and successful) ploys to make money.
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MovieStyle on 10/14/2016