MELANIA (Dir: Brett Ratner) So, what's the point? How does this superficial, wilfully deceitful reality readjustment serve the sociopathic ascension of Trump's will (because everything has to)? Watching Melania get fitted for expensive clothes in gaudy rooms, or talk up how extravagantly staged she demands her balls be - and both happen a lot in Brett Ratner's unrelentingly boring feature doc debut - only strengthen perceptions of her as a chilly, lifeless socialite wannabe. Every one of the 104 long minutes is in the service of grandiose affectation and cruel irony; when her scripted oration contains gems like, “We are all one humanity”, and Ratner cuts to her holding her husband's hand... mean, really? But then, the focus pivots from Melania to the pageantry of her husband's inauguration, and Barron Trump gradually slinks into frame, then into close-up. And I realised then what the point was - Trump is tightening his family business’ grip on the White House beyond his years and before our eyes. MELANIA is not the story of the First Lady of American politics, but the imagining of the first homeland monarch in U.S. history. This is not a film concerned at all with the America of today; it is propaganda that serves the formation of a future non-democracy. ONE STAR.