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      ‘The Apprentice’ Review: An Origin Story for Donald J. Trump

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      In this ribald fictional telling of a young Trump’s rise, the man responsible is the lawyer Roy Cohn, played to sleazy perfection by Jeremy Strong.Midway through “The Apprentice,” a gleefully vulgar fictional dramatization of the loves and deals of the young Donald J. Trump, the movie’s look changes. From the start, the images have had the grainy quality that you sometimes see in films from the 1970s, which is when the movie opens. Then suddenly, while Donald — a terrific Sebastian Stan — is giving a TV interview in 1980, faint horizontal lines begin slicing across the image, evoking the flicker in analog video. It’s a sly nod at the future and a brand-new reality: A (television) star is born.“The Apprentice” is arriving in theaters less than a month before the U.S. presidential election, but it would be a strain to call this energetic, queasily funny if finally very bleak portrait an October surprise. The real Trump’s reaction to the movie suggested that it had the makings of a bombshell, though the most shocking parts of the movie have been reported elsewhere. His campaign called it “garbage” the day after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and his lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to the filmmakers. Yet the only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.In broad strokes, “The Apprentice” recounts a familiar story of individual empowerment and (gilded) bootstraps through Donald, who hungers for the very best, or at least shiniest, that life can offer, be it women, clothing, swank digs or amber waves of hair. Like the hero in a Horatio Alger tale, except with, you know, family money and connections, Donald finds success partly through his association with a slithery lawyer, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, fantastic), who was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Senate’s 1950s investigations into Communist influence in the United States. Roy becomes Donald’s mentor, helping him achieve his American dream that here has the makings of a nightmare.The director Ali Abbasi thrusts you right in the scrum, opening on Donald as he navigates the outwardly mean, trash-choked streets of Times Square. It’s 1973, and New York seems to be on the ropes. Parts of the city look like they’ve been bombed, and its rats are on the march. It’s tough out there, even for ambitious go-getters. Yet Donald, who’s in his late 20s and works for the Trump family’s sprawling real-estate business — he knocks on residential tenant doors to personally collect the rent — has grandiose plans to revive the struggling city and make his fortune by giving a hulking, rundown Midtown hotel a classy makeover.Donald’s aspirations for that hotel, the Commodore, become the first in a series of ladder rungs he grasps on his upward climb through the 1970s and into the go-go ’80s. Working from a script by Gabriel Sherman, Abbasi tracks Donald’s high points and low on his transformational journey, which takes him from testy meals in his parents’ Queens home and into Manhattan’s corridors of power, its boardrooms and party dens. Whether in the back seat of a stretch limo or riding along with Roy Cohn in a Rolls, Donald is on the make and on the move. (Sherman wrote “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” a biography of the Fox News executive Roger Ailes; Abbasi’s directing credits include “Holy Spider.”)Donald’s path, as it were, proves grim and glittering by turns, and is lined with shrewd wheedling, outlandish excesses, sketchy characters and anguished family drama. There’s also somewhat of a fork in his road, symbolized by his relationship with Roy and his romance with a feisty, skeptical Czech model, Ivana (an appealing Maria Bakalova). The movie suggests that Ivana is good for Donald and maybe a potential lodestar, but he’s in thrall to Roy and to his father, Fred (an unrecognizable Martin Donovan). A tyrant who berates his grown children at the family dining-room table, especially his eldest son, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), Fred is the father Donald conspicuously fears and whom he trades in for Roy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story’ Review: In Blithe Spirits

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      A brisk documentary by Barnaby Thompson counters that the tuxedo-wearing playwright hid his insecurities under a platinum-plated veneer.When Ian Fleming asked him to play the villainous Dr. No in the first 007 movie, Noël Coward, one of the defining theatrical talents of the 20th century, fired off this telegram: “No, no, no, a thousand times no!”“Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story,” a brisk documentary by Barnaby Thompson, counters that Coward was closer to Broadway’s James Bond, a dashing Brit as cool and dry as a martini. As proof, the film opens with the pop star Adam Lambert reworking Coward’s titular 1932 song into a groove that pairs divinely with a collage of Coward modeling tuxedos — and would go just as well with a montage of Daniel Craig.Coward’s suave persona was itself a character he played to perfection (and exhaustion) on and offstage. Born into relative poverty, he became a self-educated sophisticate who hid his insecurities and then-criminalized homosexuality under a platinum-plated veneer.That’s as much psychology as Thompson is willing to indulge. Coward wasn’t one for pity, and neither is the film. Instead, it glides on to name-check his staggering résumé — “Private Lives,” “Design for Living,” “Cavalcade,” “Easy Virtue,” “Brief Encounter” — and parade its wonderful archival footage: travelogues of Coward cradling tiny snakes and home movies with his early boyfriend and business manager, Jack Wilson.The documentary’s biggest challenge is shaping Coward’s biography into a satisfying roller coaster of highs and lows. During Coward’s years in Jamaica, the narrator (Alan Cumming) regales us with the time Queen Elizabeth II detoured 80 miles to enjoy his beachfront vodka-and-beef bullion shooters; Cumming has scarcely finished the tale before he’s made to intone that Coward, a future knight, was “destined to die forgotten in exile.” Whenever things risk getting personal, you can practically hear Coward repurpose a threat from “Blithe Spirit,” his smash hit about a disgruntled ghost: Stop fawning on me or I shall break something.Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Terrifier 3’ Review: Still Clowning Around

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      The deaths remain grisly, but the pacing uneven in this new installment in Damien Leone’s horror franchise.Nobody is pushing horror boundaries quite like the writer-director Damien Leone. Eight years ago, his killer clown film “Terrifier” had gorehounds buzzing. Its 2022 sequel unexpectedly broke into the mainstream and to date has earned over $15 million, a huge haul for a blood-drenched exploitation slasher.Leone’s new “Terrifier” film sags under its predecessors’ trappings: a bloated running time, an unfocused script, uneven pacing. But when Leone steps on the gas with Art the Clown — the franchise’s signature psycho-butcher, fiendishly played again by David Howard Thornton — he gets a jump on Santa, delivering an extreme and gruesome early Christmas gift.“Terrifier 3” picks up five years after the previous film but at Christmas, and Art is a killing machine in a Santa Claus suit. (It helps to have seen the first two films.) Art has a new monstrous female accomplice, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who aids Art in inventively torturing and killing his victims, including death by intubated rodent tunnel.Back are the ferocious final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her now college-aged brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who join new characters in fights to end Art’s unquenchable bloodthirst. Christien Tinsley, the prosthetics and makeup effects creator, is a ruthless master of decapitations and glistening viscera.Devastated stomachs are badges of honor for “Terrifier” fans, and the great gut buster here comes when Art bombs a mall Santa meet-and-greet — a scene that makes “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” the once shocking evil St. Nick slasher, look like “Miracle on 34th Street.”Terrifier 3Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We Live in Time’ Review: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s Weepie

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      Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield star in this weepie romance that tries to be modern by unfolding over three intersecting timelines.Time doesn’t stand still in “We Live in Time,” a shamelessly old-fashioned weepie about love and heartache; it jitters and jumps, restlessly shifting back and forth. Set in contemporary Britain, the story follows Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) over a half-decade or so as their relationship develops around familiar milestones. They fall into bed and then into love, move in together and have a child, all while celebrating triumphs and weathering tragedies. As the years pass, they grow older, naturally, but their story is somewhat more complicated than most only because it unfolds out of chronological order.It’s a clever conceit that suggests how we experience the passage of time and, in the more successful interludes, conveys how the past, present and future inform one another. Early on, Almut whips up some eggs before waking Tobias in a sun-drenched bedroom in their picture-perfect country home. In a following sequence — which turns out to be set years before — he jolts awake in their darkened London flat and checks on the heavily pregnant Almut. Each awakening is connected by the couple’s love and ministering tenderness; intentionally or not, the scenes also signal that this movie has a real thing for eggs, fertilized and not.Written by Nick Payne and directed by John Crowley, “We Live in Time” is set during three time periods — one lasts several years, another six months and the third about a day — that have been minced and mixed together. The transitions between the different times are blunt and, at first, they’re a touch disorienting because they don’t come with the usual prompts; there are no rapidly turning calendar pages or characters mistily announcing, “I remember ….” Instead, the filmmakers keep you grounded in the separate eras partly through Tobias and Almut’s changing hairstyles, as well as through the birth of their daughter, Ella (Grace Delaney), who grows from a topic of discussion into a charming little kid.Even as the filmmakers shuffle the couple’s different epochs around in a nonlinear fashion, time demands its due, as it must. As Almut and Tobias settle in for the long haul, more than just their hair changes. Almut, who quickly proves the richer character, undergoes significant transformations, including professionally as she goes from cooking in a small restaurant to presiding over a large staff in her own Michelin-starred place. Fairly early on, she and Tobias also receive the grim news from a doctor that her ovarian cancer has returned. It’s a jolt; it is the first indication that she’s been ill, and it’s also clear that the bad news will keep on coming.For the most part, Pugh and Garfield are pleasantly watchable, and they fit together persuasively enough to convey their characters’ mutual attraction. That’s the case even if Almut is more convincingly fleshed out than Tobias, who, as the story continues, can seem like both an obstacle and an appendage to this complicated woman. Almut doesn’t just give birth and fall gravely ill — which is already a lot for any one character — she’s far more professionally engaged than Tobias, who’s as bland as his job (for a cereal company) sounds. It’s an underwritten, reactive role that, particularly as Almut’s health crisis worsens, finds Garfield too often leaning on his talent for flooding his big, beseeching eyes with tears.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Bad Genius’ Review: Cheating the System

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      This remake of a hit Thai film about college admissions, starring Callina Liang, adds an element of racial politics to its heist story.At dinner at the home of one of her wealthy white classmates, Lynn (Callina Liang), a high-achieving Asian American high school student, finds out why she’s really there. Her classmate’s parents want her to help their son get into Columbia University, in whatever way is necessary. It’s quite the loaded setup in “Bad Genius,” a film that arrives a year after affirmative action in college admissions ended via a lawsuit in which, some argued, Asian Americans were used to advance a white conservative agenda.That thorny element of racial politics is the bold new ingredient in a remake of a hit Thai movie from 2017. This version, directed by J.C. Lee, is otherwise faithful to the original, following Lynn, a scholarship student at a prestigious high school who resorts to running a cheating ring to pay for college. For her big score, she enlists the help of Bank (Jabari Banks), a scholarship student whose parents are Nigerian immigrants.In practice, “Bad Genius” doesn’t actually have the political bite to back its bark. For all of its declarations meant to be scathing indictments of a rigged system, it is glaringly resistant to ever saying the word “white.” Nor does its young cast have the dramatic poise to elevate the script. Benedict Wong, as Lynn’s father, is an underused bright spot.Despite the film’s aims at spiky commentary, the class rebellion mostly serves as the thin wrapping to, at best, a middling heist movie that loses some of the punchy tension of the original’s getaway sequences. At its worst, it’s no more than a teenage soap opera.Bad GeniusNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong Say ‘The Apprentice’ Is a ‘Human Tragedy’

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      It’s natural to feel nervous before presenting your movie at a major film festival. But in late August, when the director Ali Abbasi boarded a flight to the Telluride Film Festival, he wasn’t even sure if his new movie “The Apprentice” — a fictionalized look at the Machiavellian bond between the young Donald J. Trump (Sebastian Stan) and the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) — would be permitted to play there at all.“It was really crazy what happened, and I spared Jeremy and Sebastian some of it, but it is a demoralizing feeling,” Abbasi admitted during a recent video call with his two stars. The former president had been threatening legal action against “The Apprentice” since its May debut at the Cannes Film Festival, which chilled distributor interest in the movie for months and made it a controversial prospect for any subsequent festival willing to show it.“If a movie comes out and people think it’s bad or it’s flawed, you can deal with that,” Abbasi said. “But when it goes into a safe box indefinitely, that was heavy.”In the end, Trump failed to follow through on his threats, Telluride played the movie without incident and “The Apprentice” ultimately found a distributor in Briarcliff Entertainment, which will release the film on Friday. Still, Strong was perturbed by how many major studios were unwilling to take on the film and potentially incur the presidential candidate’s wrath.“You think that things could be banned in North Korea or Russia or certain places, but you don’t think that will ever happen here,” Strong said. “It’s a real dark harbinger that it even nearly happened.”Written by Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” begins with Trump in his 20s as he toils under his real-estate magnate father and aspires to become a momentous figure in his own right. Still, Trump’s ambition exceeds his ability until he meets the savvy Cohn, who takes the young man under his wing and imparts ruthless rules for success that will eventually launch Trump onto the highest stage imaginable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Waiting Hours for 3 Minutes in the Criterion Closet (Well, Van)

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      A mobile version of movie fans’ favorite stockroom drew hundreds of New York Film Festival visitors eager to experience what celebrities do in popular videos.The hottest event at this year’s New York Film Festival isn’t a film at all. It’s a van.Parked next to Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the mobile version of the Criterion Closet — a tiny space stocked with the prestigious DVDs and Blu-rays of films in the Criterion Collection — attracted a line that wrapped around the block.It was a chance for festivalgoers to enact their own version of the Closet Picks videos, in which celebrities like Bill Hader, Ayo Edebiri and Willem Dafoe visit a product-filled closet in the company’s Manhattan office. They pick out their favorite titles and evangelize about their choices while not so coincidentally on tour promoting their latest projects. (Dafoe’s haul included Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” and the actor’s own “The Last Temptation of Christ”; Edebiri left with Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” among other titles, and Hader’s selections included the western “My Darling Clementine.”)Criterion said some 900 people visited the van.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesFor the company’s 40th anniversary, it adapted the experience to the inside of a delivery van and opened it up to the public, starting with the first two weekends of the New York Film Festival (which concludes Oct. 13). The next stop, scheduled for Oct. 26 and 27, will be in Brooklyn Bridge Park in collaboration with St. Ann’s Warehouse.Visitors to the van are invited to film their own Closet Picks videos and pull titles from the shelf to gush about for the camera. Unlike the celebrities, they do have to pay for their picks, but with a 40 percent discount.“It was something no one ever thought we could do,” said Rainna Stapelfeldt, 26, a Bed-Stuy resident who took home “Sid and Nancy,” “Midnight Cowboy” and “Memories of Murder” after a 10-hour wait in line.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Menendez Brothers’: 4 Takeaways From the Netflix Documentary

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      The documentary, based on extensive new interviews with Lyle and Erik Menendez, adds fresh nuance and details about their parents’ murders and the aftermath.The true crime drama “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” has been one of the most viewed series on Netflix since its Sept. 19 debut, driving enormous interest once again in the Menendez brothers, who in 1989 murdered their parents with shotguns inside the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.On Monday, the same streaming platform released “The Menendez Brothers,” a feature-length documentary by Alejandro Hartmann, which draws from 20 hours of new phone interviews with the brothers from prison. It also includes on-camera interviews with surviving family members, journalists, the first prosecuting attorney and several jurors from the two criminal trials of the 1990s.After a sensational trial that ended in hung juries in 1994 (the brothers had separate juries), Lyle and Erik were retried and convicted in 1996, sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For the second trial, the judge barred the defense from using most of the testimony supporting its argument that the brothers had killed their parents out of fear following years of sexual, emotional and physical abuse.The case has become something of a cause célèbre in recent years, with celebrities and young social media users advocating the brothers’ release, particularly as new evidence appears to support the abuse claims.At the same time, a flurry of books, documentaries and scripted series have taken a more sympathetic view toward the brothers than they originally received; this latest documentary comes days after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced that his office was revisiting the case, saying, “We have a moral and ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More