When Amy Schumer walks in Trainwreck, her ponytail draws the eye as it swings back and forth with the impressive reach and precision of a metronome. Turns out, that look stands as a symbol for the film itself: cute on the surface, deeper underneath.

Graduating from comedian to movie star in one fell swoop — thanks in large part to a smart and highly personal script of her own doing — Schumer plays a young New Yorker named Amy, which is to say a near-Xerox version of the drunken slut she inhabits in her acidic, wildly funny (and funnier) stand-up act. Instead of telling jokes, this fictional Amy tells stories, as a writer for a too-hip city magazine run by a crazy woman (Snowpiercer’s Tilda Swinton, glammed up to a point of nonrecognition). Whereas her fellow staffers work on pieces like a guide to workplace masturbation, Amy is assigned to profile Aaron (Saturday Night Live vet Bill Hader), a sports-medicine physician. Among his roster of superstar patients is basketball’s LeBron James, who is better than expected in a supporting role as himself. James is one-upped in the department of scene-stealing by WWE champ John Cena (The Marine), not playing himself, but Amy’s steroidal, sexually confused suitor.

Aaron is as buttoned-up as Amy is fucked-up, so, as romantic comedies demand, these opposites must attract. But Trainwreck is not your average rom-com, as anyone familiar with Schumer’s 50 shades of blue humor (so blue, it’s the warmest color) knows before frame one. Given that and a ratio more “com” than “rom,” the material is a natural for Judd Apatow. Although this marks the first movie he’s directed that he didn’t also write, Trainwreck works as a gender-flipped and experience-flipped variant of his 40-Year-Old Virgin. Schumer’s work bears those Apatow touchstones — awkward sex, pot smoking, riff-o-matic exchanges that wear out their welcome — yet the collaborators still manage to exploit the old Hollywood template (musical number included!) as they imbue it with pain and a vulnerability most leading ladies are not allowed to exhibit, much less possess.

More goes on in Trainwreck than meets the eye — not a ton, but enough to notice a difference; you’ll feel it first in your funny bone, then your heart. You’ll also feel it in your butt, because Apatow needlessly takes his movies to the two-hour mark and blows past it. Unlike 2012’s This Is 40 — and thank God for that! — at least this time he’s spared us from casting his two daughters. This one is Schumer’s turn in the spotlight, and she takes it and she makes it. Now, whether she can do it again … —Rod Lott

At the peak of the DVD market, I hatched a great idea about making a film called Public Domain: The Movie, which would assemble footage from dozens of the copyright-free titles populating every bargain-bin box set into an overdubbed comedy. As with all my grand visions, I never proceeded past the thinking stage. Mike Davis essentially beat me to it anyway, first with 2008’s sci-fi romp Sex Galaxy and then 2012’s President Wolfman.

Using the 1973 B-horror cheapie The Werewolf of Washington as its base — and Lord knows how many other flicks for frames here and there — President Wolfman rejiggers the Dean Stockwell vehicle into a rollicking tale about POTUS John Wolfman (voiced by Marc Evan Jackson, 22 Jump Street) making good on his last name by becoming a real werewolf after acquiring a Native American curse during a hunting trip. This occurs in the midst of Congressional shenanigans involving a Chinese buyout of good ol’ America and all its waving wheat.

This story is thin and messy, as it should be; Davis knows he needs only just enough spit to hold the disparate pieces together. From there, it’s all about firing the jokes quickly and persistently, and that he does with R-rated glee, sticking the landing not with consistency but regularity. Little footage matches from one scene to the next — or even within the same scene — which is not only part of the fun, but part of the point. If the experiment were polished, it would fail.

Instead, President Wolfman is infinitely creative, leaving no stock footage unsqueezed for potential laughter, from a crudely animated Smokey the Bear PSA to a surprisingly graphic educational reel on childbirth. Only a gyrating go-go girl during the opening credits appears to account for original footage … and who’s going to complain about such sights? (Don’t answer that.) —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.