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Hit Man Review

It’s taken a while for Glen Powell to truly step into the spotlight. After popping up in the likes of  Hidden Figures ,  Set It Up  and  Everybody Wants Some!!  (the last his first collaboration with Richard Linklater), it was 2022’s  Top Gun: Maverick  that saw him really take flight, giving an unforgettably hissable-yet-heroic performance as Lt Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin. Major turns have come since — box-office-busting romcom  Anyone But You  and another aviation adventure,  Devotion  — but it is with  Hit Man  that Powell announces himself as a movie star and a filmmaking force to be reckoned with.

Inspired by the true story of teacher-turned-pretend-assassin Gary Johnson (as reported by journalist Skip Hollandsworth in a 2001 article for  Texas Monthly ),  Hit Man  sees Powell re-team with Linklater, this time on a deeper creative level as co-writer. It takes the real-life nugget of Gary’s unusual side-hustle and expands it into a tale of murder, mystery and mugshots. Powell starts off the movie playing against type — his Gary is a socks-and-sandals-wearing loner and birdwatcher, with two cats and a bad haircut. But when he’s asked last-minute to assume the role of fake hit man, so as to lure those looking to hire him into confessing plainly enough to warrant being arrested, he is intoxicated by the confidence that being somebody else gives him.

Arjona's chemistry with Powell is sizzling, captured by Linklater through tactile touch and lingering eye contact.

Cue a hilarious roll-call of disguises, as Gary delights in researching his targets and figuring out the exact type of hitman that will draw them over the line into illegal territory. There’s the tattooed redneck with wrap-around sunglasses and camouflage bandana; the Russian-accented, cigar-chomping goth in the black leather coat; the slick-haired, sharp-suited yuppie who looks like he came straight off the set of  American Psycho ; the freckle-faced British guy with a ginger bob, dressed entirely in orange; and many, many more. Powell sinks entirely into every one of these identities, going full-on goofball with impeccable comic timing.

His finest character, though, is handsome charmer Ron. He is the assassin that Gary devises for Madison (Adria Arjona), a woman looking for a way out of her abusive marriage — but upon meeting her, Gary forgets his mission, letting Madison get away with her potential crime before striking up a relationship with her in his Ron persona. Arjona embodies both fieriness and fragility in what is surely a breakout role for her, making Madison an irresistible match for Gary/Ron while making sure there’s always something  off  about her that we can’t quite put our finger on. Her chemistry with Powell is sizzling, captured by Linklater through tactile touch and lingering eye contact. A romance based on lies and murder-for-hire is not exactly a healthy dynamic, but the pair are too magnetic for you to care, their charisma together oozing off-screen even when the plot becomes more heightened and melodramatic.

Though the narrative has plenty of twists and turns, Linklater’s direction still manages to evoke the cosy, comfortable vibe of his best hang-out movies.  Hit Man ’s visual style is clean, unfussy — not vastly inventive, but sunny and colourful and engaging. That fresh, modern aesthetic juxtaposes nicely with a more traditional, jazzy score throughout. But while there are a few dramatic scenes that work at building tension, especially in the third act, the film mostly speeds along on a pretty even keel — always entertaining, but never quite delivering huge shifts in tempo or emotion. Questionable, too, is just how quickly Gary is able to shift gear from being a bumbling, socially-awkward techie into a cool-as-a-cucumber contract killer. The script uses Gary’s work as a psychology and philosophy teacher to go some way into digging into this, and the ethics of his faux assassin role, but that exploration remains fairly surface-level.

Gary’s whiplash-inducing personality changes are but a quibble — those aside, Hit Man  delivers on just about every level. It’s funny, sexy, thrilling, fascinating. It’s original, and refreshingly so. It’s simply a friggin’ good time at the movies — and so, more’s the pity that it will receive such a limited theatrical run after being picked up for distribution by Netflix. If you can, try to experience Linklater, Powell and Arjona’s heady concoction for yourself on the big screen.

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Movie review: 'empire of light'.

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"Empire of Light" is director Sam Mendes' tribute to cinema. Actress Olivia Colman plays a slowly unraveling employee at Britain's Empire Theater in the 1980s.

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“Empire of Light,” Reviewed: Sam Mendes’s Synthetic Paean to Movie Magic

By Richard Brody

The writer and director Sam Mendes’s new film, “Empire of Light,” centered on the employees of an English movie theatre in the early nineteen-eighties, belongs to a genre unto itself: cooking-show cinema. Mendes seems to have given himself a list of mandatory ingredients and develops the film to fit them all in, however clumsily. There’s no intrinsic problem with conspicuous contrivance or a willful cinematic collage, whether involving the Marx Brothers or the New Wave. The trouble with Mendes’s film is in the effort to combine the pieces in a way that feels natural, in an artifice that’s devised to be nearly invisible. It’s a synthetic that presents itself as organic. In the process, the film smothers its authentic parts, never lets its drama take root and grow, never lets its characters come to life.

Olivia Colman stars as Hilary Small, the so-called duty manager of a spectacularly appointed movie theatre in a provincial seaside town on the southern coast of England. (The movie was filmed at Margate.) She is on the cusp of middle age, and her solitude appears to weigh on her. She lives alone, she eats alone, she seems to have little social life outside of her cordial association with her colleagues. At the start of the action, just before Christmas, she has recently returned to work after a stay in a mental hospital; at her doctor’s office, she tells him that she’s feeling “numb,” which he attributes to the lithium that she takes. (She lies to him about having family and friends to talk to.)

Hilary is also having an affair, of sorts, with her boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), the theatre’s general manager, who is married. She’s a reader with a fund of poetry to quote, seemingly a literary person who appears out of place in her daily role overseeing ticket sales, dispensing popcorn and candy, cleaning the theatre, tidying Ellis’s office, and organizing the other half-dozen or so employees’ time and tasks. She doesn’t seem bored, she doesn’t seem miserable—she merely seems mechanical. Then Ellis hires a new employee to help with ticket sales and other practicalities, Stephen Murray (Micheal Ward), a cheerful and eager young man whose elegant wit and easy curiosity sets him apart from the others; he and Hilary become fast friends, and then lovers. (He’s the first to pursue the friendship; she’s the first to demonstrate romantic feelings.) Stephen harbors the unfulfilled ambition go to university to become an architect. Hilary encourages him to pursue his dream, and, thanks to him, she begins to come out of her shell.

Stephen is Black, a fact that’s of no significance among his white colleagues, who are friendly and welcoming, but one that proves to be of appalling importance in general. He is confronted in the theatre by a patron who makes racist remarks, and the town is infested with white supremacists who, emboldened by British nativist politicians and enraged by Black British people’s demands for equal rights, harass Stephen in the street and turn increasingly dangerous. Meanwhile, his relationship with Hilary begins to take a toll on both of them, as their co-workers begin to suspect something.

Hilary is reprising the kind of relationship that she and Ellis have had—not just one among colleagues but one between a supervisor and a subordinate. That—along with (perhaps) the racial difference, along with (perhaps) the age difference, along with (perhaps) the fact that Stephen is still grieving over a failed romantic relationship with another woman, along with (perhaps) his academic ambitions—comes between them and threatens to push Hilary into crisis mode. That crisis, a story of past troubles and past horrors, of a hard childhood and subsequent abuses, of thwarted dreams and stifled rage, is the emotional core of the film.

Hilary is something of a classic character: a sad sack. In American movies, a sad sack is a sociopath-in-waiting, a ticking time bomb preparing to explode, whereas a British sad sack is merely a human machine going through the motions of life, a ticking clock that is simply winding down. American society, thin on formalities, exerts little pressure on solitary characters, whereas British life, which is more formal and punctilious, may add structure to lives that otherwise have little of it. That’s where “Empire of Light” is at its best; in treating Hilary like a compressed figure, shaped from the outside by social forces, Mendes tries (and, to a limited extent, manages) to show not the character but the forces themselves, to show the mold into which the character has been pushed, deformed, tormented. But the dramatic result of showing the mold rather than the character is the lack of detail in characterization—which wouldn’t be an issue if the movie weren’t a character study.

Mendes builds the movie mainly in dialogue scenes that often start promisingly, that show his protagonists confiding and confessing, struggling to express themselves and beginning to find the strength to do so. But they are typically cut short (whether by Mendes’s editorial will or by the mere limit of his own screenwriterly imagination) once the scene dispenses the tidbits of information that fit into the tight dramatic mosaic. It’s a movie filled with its perhapses and its vaguenesses, and the characters turn up only enough cards to keep viewers guessing at the table. The movie plays ambiguously with Hilary’s illness, to significant symbolic ends but frustrating dramatic ones: Mendes suggests that it’s the unchallenged assumptions of social life, of gender relationships, that are sick—that what Hilary has endured is enough to depress and derange any woman sensitive enough to take stock of the dire situation. It’s a rhetorical notion that the film places alongside the overt racist pathologies afflicting England; Mendes, in putting an age gap between Hilary and Stephen, also suggests a changing generational approach to endemic abuses and systemic injustices.

The movie’s motives and premises are its strengths. Its utter absence of detail, nuance, inner life, and complex expression are its failures. Its connection to the world of movies, as a subject, is simply incongruous, although the theatre itself is a virtual character in the film—the building is a kind of masterwork of populist modernism, and its slender yet slablike parts and its asymmetrical perpendicularity are meshed with Art Deco details and lavishly comfortable furnishings. Hilary has little connection to movies, but a great one to the building itself—and to past graces that it harbors, ghostlike, in a shuttered upstairs ballroom that formerly hosted dances. (The theatre’s marquee still advertises that erstwhile attraction.) Her association with it remains (yes, again) unspecified. As for the cinema itself, its glories are incarnated by the theatre’s longtime projectionist, Norman (Toby Jones), who decorates his booth with the iconography of classic movies and their stars. Norman talks about the equipment of 35-mm. projection with love and initiates the curious and technically adept Stephen in that love, too.

“Empire of Light” gets its title from the wry illusions of Magritte, but reflects none of their self-deflating humor or conspicuous delight in deception. Rather, it builds to a grand, nostalgic, sentimental paean to the art of popular movies, and does so with no irony, no sense of history, no self-questioning of the art form itself. Mendes doesn’t contemplate or hint at the connection between the Hollywood movies (and the British hits) of the era and the social crises that he diagnoses, between mass media and mass politics, between the mores of movies and the ways of private life and public discourse. Instead, Mendes nostalgically connects himself to a fading and troubled past, without ambivalence or self-doubt, as if he had the recipe for its redemption. ♦

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Put on the watch. Light the cigarette, fold back the silk, and use the cigarette to burn a hole in the silk. Then put your eye up to the hole and look through, all the way through, until you find yourself falling through the hole and into the shifting patterns you see on the other side.

That's a metaphor for watching and making movies, and it's one way to watch "Inland Empire" -- a way that is, in fact, specifically recommended in the movie itself. This is David Lynch 's film -- the one he's been making since "Eraserhead" -- and it offers you multiple ways to view it as it uncoils over nearly three hours, encouraging you to see it from all of them at once. It is, after all, overtly about the relationship between the movie and the observer, the actor and the performance, the watcher and the watched (and the watch).

In this sense, you might say, "Inland Empire" is a digital film, through and through. Not because Lynch shot it with the relatively small Sony PD-150 digicam and fell in love with the smeary, malleable and unstable texture of digital video (where the brightest Los Angeles sunlight can be as void and terrifying as the darkest shadow), or because the first pieces of the movie were digital shorts he made for his Web site before they grew and crystallized into a narrative idea. "Inland Empire" unfolds in a digital world (a replication of consciousness itself -- hence the title), where events really do transpire in multiple locations at the same time (or multiple times at the same place), observers are anywhere and everywhere at once, and realities are endlessly duplicable, repeatable and tweakable. This is a digital dimension where, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard , there's no difference between ketchup and paint and light and blood: On the screen, it's red.

"Inland Empire" presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie. When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's " Sunset Boulevard ," Lynch's " Persona ," or Lynch's " 8 1/2 ," they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's " The Shining ," Jean-Luc Godard's " Pierrot le Fou ," Bunuel and Dali's " Un Chien Andalou ," Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon" (a Lynch favorite), and others.

Of course, it's also a tour-de-Lynch, in which we virtually revisit spaces and images and faces ( Laura Dern , Justin Theroux , Grace Zabriskie , Harry Dean Stanton ... ) that resonate with memories of "Eraserhead," " Blue Velvet ," "Twin Peaks," " Wild at Heart ," " Lost Highway ," " Mulholland Drive ," "Inland Empire" itself -- and some perpetually unfinished Lynch movie of the future. Because, in the Inland Empire, nobody can quite remember if it's today or two days from now, because yesterday and the day after tomorrow are all transpiring in the present tense. Or, as one character puts it so memorably, "I suppose if it was 9:45, I would think it is after midnight."

You probably already know by now if you're inclined to want to see "Inland Empire," which is a good thing because it's practically impossible to review in a newspaper. It has a story -- multiple stories, all intertwined and interconnected at various nodes -- but it's structured more like a web than a yarn. Synopsis is futile, but the tag line states its elemental appeal as succinctly as possible: "A Woman in Trouble."

Let it suffice to say that the actress Laura Dern plays a Hollywood actress named Nikki Grace who is hired to play the character of Sue Blue in a movie called "On High in Blue Tomorrows," directed by Kingsley ( Jeremy Irons ) and co-starring Devon (Justin Theroux) as Billy Side. Turns out their movie may be some kind of shadow remake of a film that was never finished because of something that went wrong -- "something inside the story," as Kinglsey describes it.

There you have it. Something inside the story goes awry, the watch spring snaps and the works go flying in all directions, from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine to Poland to Pomona. Gypsies and gangsters and whores and animals appear. Blood and circuses! "Inland Empire" works -- and works spectacularly -- as a kind of fractal telenovela. Take any moment -- any shot or sequence or motif -- and you'll find it repeated throughout the film at greater and lesser degrees of magnification. Like a fractal image, any single fragment contains within it a representation of the whole picture.

As they pass before you, you recognize the familiar stock images, characters and dramatic templates -- often employed to build suspense, deliver a shock, jerk tears -- from a million other movies, especially the climactic moments in noir thrillers (like the one on TV at the start of "Blue Velvet"), melodramatic serials and soapy romances. There's the dark hallway, the shadowy stairway, the gun in the drawer, the seduction scene, the portentious expositional dialogue, the bedroom/sex scene, the ominous foreshadowing.... But here they're deliberately disjointed because the usual connective tissue has been moved, removed or replaced.

Lynch knows all stories are all in our heads; we make them up and then inhabit them. "Inland Empire" plays with our movie-fed storytelling expectations line by line, shot by shot, scene by scene, even reel by reel (pay attention to those changeover marks in the upper right). He toys with the building blocks -- establishing shots, reaction shots, POV, and especially closeups -- to get us to look at them in unfamiliar ways. It's poetry: We recognize the individual units of meaning, but the grammar and syntax have been altered.

And "Inland Empire" is very much a movie about acting, built around a towering performance by Dern that is itself about giving (and watching) a towering performance. There's a moment, when Dern's distorted, clown-like face is actually projected onto someone else's head, which has got to be the ultimate actor's nightmare: "This is what I do: I make big, grotesque clown-faces to parrot human behavior." You'll want to scream; you probably will. Lynch has actively campaigned (with a cow, on Sunset Boulevard) for an Academy Award nomination for Dern, and for very good reasons. Not only is Dern mind-blowingly terrific, but a nomination itself would be a meta-expansion/continuation of "Inland Empire," and the performance(s) she gives in it.

"Inland Empire" opens and contracts in your imagination while you watch it -- and you're still watching it well after it's left the screen. It's a long but thoroughly absorbing three hours (perhaps necessary for a movie that continually readjusts perceptions of time), but I feel like it's not over yet. It's still playing in my head, like a downloaded compressed file that's expanding and installing itself in my brain. This David Lynch, he put his digital virus in me.

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Inland Empire (2007)

Rated R for language, some violence and sexuality/nudity.

172 minutes

Laura Dern as Nikki/Sue

Jeremy Irons as Kingsley

Harry Dean Stanton as Freddie

Justin Theroux as Devon/Billy

Peter J. Lucas as Piotrek Krol

Written and directed by

• David Lynch

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‘Megalopolis’ Review: Francis Ford Coppola’s Wild and Delirious Fever Dream Inspires New Hope for the Future of Movies

David ehrlich.

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After more than 40 years of idly fantasizing about the project (and more than 20 years of actively trying to finance it), Coppola is bringing “ Megalopolis ” to screens at a moment when his chosen medium is struggling to find a way forward, and the world around it seems teetering on the brink of collapse. Just as in 63 B.C., when an evil patrician named Catiline appealed to a coalition of malcontents in a bid to overthrow the Republic, we are choked by the grip of delusional aristocrats and vertically integrated conglomerates whose lust for power and profit is only matched by their lack of foresight. Even with the past as our guide, we are at imminent risk of allowing the now to destroy the forever.  Related Stories Palme d’Or Winner ‘Anora’ and Best Actor Jesse Plemons Get Oscar Boost at Cannes Cannes 2024 Sales: Andrea Arnold’s ‘Bird’ Goes to MUBI

Coppola has always believed in America, but his faith is eroding by the second, and “Megalopolis” is nothing if not the boldest and most open-hearted of his many bids to stop time before it’s too late (an effort that has informed so much of his career, from “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” to “Youth After Youth” and “Jack”). As ever, he recognizes the futility in the attempt, even if his characters are sometimes a bit slow on the uptake. 

With “Megalopolis,” he crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones. To quote one of the sharper non-sequiturs from a script that’s swimming in them: “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.”

Like Cesar, it might be for the best if we take a step back. Let’s start with New Rome, which is pretty much just downtown Atlanta cosplaying as a modern-day Manhattan that’s been artificially saturated with a vanilla skyline and set-dressed to resemble a Joel Schumacher Batman movie (complete with the same faux-debauched energy, and a host of glaring digital flourishes that also locate “Megalopolis” somewhere in the vicinity of Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker,” the only other movie so far this year that can match the go-for-broke visual exuberance on display here).

Cesar’s great hope for the future of this hodgepodge city is a new element he invented called Megalon, which glows yellow, does whatever is most convenient for the scene at hand, and may or may not have played a role in the tragic death of his wife. “Megalopolis” is of course dedicated to Coppola’s late wife Eleanor, who died after the completion of the film , but whose loving memory nevertheless casts a long shadow over this story about a self-involved iconoclast whose mind is always obsessively preoccupied with his work. 

The DA who prosecuted the city’s failed homicide case against Cesar is now the mayor of New Rome, and our hero’s rival in the bid to control the megalopolis’ levers of power; his name is Franklyn Cicero (natch), he’s played by a game and jowly Giancarlo Esposito, and his beautiful daughter Julia will soon become Cesar’s closest advisor and most intimate muse (credit to Nathalie Emmanuel, doing her best with a wooden character in a film that reduces all of its women to cartoons in the face of male genius). Cesar envisions a New Rome that “people can dream about,” while Cicero hopes to build “a fun casino” with more practical dividends. 

That sort of creatively unbound approach may not have resulted in a surplus of dramatically coherent scenes, but it undergirds the entire movie with a looseness that makes it almost impossible to look away. You never know when Grace VanderWaal might split into five identical clones of herself while singing an original pop anthem about her virginity, or when Laurence Fishburne — back for more of the fun he had with Coppola on the set of “Apocalypse Now” — might invoke some more wisdom via his voiceover narration, or when Aubrey Plaza’s gold-digging seductress/news anchor might shift her overt sexual attention to a different member of New Rome’s ruling class. Her character’s name is Wow Platinum, because every generation gets the “Southland Tales” it deserves. First she’s hot for Cesar, then for his gazillionaire banker uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), and finally for Crassus’ sociopathic court jester of a son, Clodio Pulcher (a palpably malevolent Shia LaBeouf). 

The story is sustained by the sheer force of Coppola’s enthusiasm for it, and it hardly seems to matter that each scene feeds into the next with the grace of a wave crashing into a jetty — not when it’s so exciting to see what might happen next, and stray moments of transcendent surprise can be found hiding in even the flattest stretches. Two people connected by an invisible rope as they run through a hallway. A fallen rose suspended in mid-air. A rain-slicked noir chase sequence melting into a vision of eternal devotion. 

So while it might be tempting to see this kooky, nepotistically cloistered, and unconscionably expensive magnum opus as the self-involved work of a fading artist who’s lost whatever was left of his ability to tell good ideas from bad, “Megalopolis” does everything in its power to remind the audience that we share in the outcome of its demented fever dream. Which isn’t to say that we’re obligated to make this particular movie a success, only that we’d do well to examine the source of whatever hostility it might reflexively produce within us. Why does change scare us so much that we’d sooner forfeit our freedom to imagine a better world than reckon with the possibilities such freedom allows? Quoth Marcus Aurelius again: “The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make of it.” 

“I will not let time have dominion over my thoughts,” Cesar repeats to himself as a compulsive mantra. “Artists can never lose their control of time,” Julia tells him. “Painters freeze it, poets sing of it, musicians rhythmatize it…,” she trails off. What do filmmakers do? They stop it to remind us that we can’t. With the profoundly moving final shot of “Megalopolis,” Coppola insists that’s all the more reason to fight for the future. 

“Megalopolis” premiered in Competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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‘the apprentice’ review: sebastian stan and jeremy strong are superb in chilling account of the unholy alliance that birthed donald trump.

Maria Bakalova and Martin Donovan also star in Ali Abbasi’s detailed chronicle of the future U.S. president’s rise in the 1970s and ‘80s under the tutelage of cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

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To clear any confusion up front, The Apprentice has nothing to do with the NBC reality competition of that name, in which Donald Trump sifted through a field of aspiring businesspeople to identify the most promising of them, sending an eliminated contestant home each week with the brutal dismissal, “You’re fired!” On the other hand, you could say that Ali Abbasi’s biographical drama has everything to do with the television series.

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Written by political journalist and Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman, the movie is first and foremost the story of a Faustian pact, in which the eager apprentice is schooled to ditch conventional notions of morality, ethics and empathy, eventually surpassing his Mephistophelean teacher in cold emotional detachment.

While a disclaimer acknowledges that some elements have been slightly fictionalized, the vast majority of Sherman’s screenplay deals in known facts. That could be considered a limitation, since many will wonder what’s the point of a movie that tells us nothing new.

One thing that will be interesting about this first English-language feature from Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi — who forged his reputation in Cannes with Border and Holy Spider and directed the terrific closing episodes of the first season of The Last of Us — is who will be its audience. Will either side want to see this? With no U.S. distribution deal in place as yet, that remains a mystery.

Liberals will see it as a stomach-churning making-of-a-monster account while the MAGA faithful might conceivably misconstrue it as an endorsement of their guy, who has made the killer instinct his brand. That’s not to say the movie’s political sympathies are unclear. But if the Trump years have taught us anything, it’s that truth is elastic and perception can be skewed to whatever angle is most expedient.

It stretches from the crooked end of the Nixon years, a boon for sourness and cynicism, through the Reagan presidency and the ascendancy of corporate greed. That time span consecrated the supremacy of the “winner” and the contemptuous mockery of the “loser,” one of the most obnoxious commonplace denigrations in American life. The chief tenet Trump learns from Cohn takes the distinction one step further, asserting that the world is divided into killers and losers.

Sherman’s script zooms in on Trump when he’s a lieutenant in the employ of his real estate baron father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan, scary), collecting rent from tenants who obviously loathe the landlord and his policies. The family business is under attack in a civil rights suit alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act, stemming from Trump Sr.’s discriminatory policies against Black prospective tenants. “How can I be racist when I have a Black driver?” bellows Fred.

Donald is eager to get out from under the old man’s shadow. The opening sequence shows him striding through the heart of Manhattan, a less graceful version of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever , at a time of rising crime and fiscal disaster, when the town’s reputation had gone from “Fun City” to “Fear City.” His eyes are fixed on the crumbling Commodore Hotel by Grand Central Station, the site of his first luxury development.

Cohn is indignant that anyone should try to tell Fred Trump to whom he can rent; he uses compromising information about a D.A. to get the case thrown out. That gets the Feds off Donald’s father’s back and clears the way for him to get investors on board for the Commodore project. A meeting engineered by Cohn yields a strategic partnership with Hyatt.

The lawyer who proudly sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair and was a key force in the McCarthy witch hunts is a great role for Strong. He makes the character suitably icy, a fast talker with a withering stare and an almost inhuman intensity. The actor has fun with the hypocrisy of an unapologetic dirty trickster who claims unwavering fidelity to “truth, justice and the American way.” Sherman makes sure we see how the entire Trump playbook was forged out of their alliance.

It’s somewhat predictable that when Cohn early on explains his three cardinal rules, Trump will later claim credit for them as his own credo: 1. Attack. Attack. Attack. 2. Admit nothing. Deny everything. 3. Claim victory and never admit defeat.

While there are faint glimmers of a moral conscience in some of Stan’s early scenes, such concerns are quickly swept aside once Donald starts seeing the results Cohn gets with bullying chicanery. His gaze hardens, along with his lacquered hair, as he begins to construct a persona based on Cohn’s teachings.

That’s seen as a factor in Trump’s gradual distancing of himself from Cohn — until he needs his counsel again — but mainly it’s because the student overtakes the teacher, often shrugging off his advice. It’s to Strong’s credit that, while playing an odious, utterly irredeemable human being, he finds notes of pathos in Cohn’s decline.

One matter in which Donald ignores Roy’s cautionary warnings is his determination to marry Ivana Zelnickova, despite the Czech model’s repeated attempts to brush him off. Trump’s first wife is played by Maria Bakalova with savvy self-possession and what seems like full awareness of her husband’s negative attributes, plus a convenient ability to overlook them. She also shows signs of sensitivity that make her mildly sympathetic.

But the marriage begins disintegrating once Donald tires of her. One primary reason is seemingly that she has a head for business and he finds that unattractive. His wandering eye and ample opportunities for philandering don’t help either. “Donald has no shame,” says Ivana at one point with matter-of-fact disdain, and she means it literally.

A lot can be observed about Trump’s attitude toward women from his devolving relationship with Ivana, and one shocking scene that will likely raise hackles with the former president’s supporters feeds into the multiple accusations of sexual abuse against him.

Some will argue that Stan’s performance in the central role is a touch too likeable, but the actor does an excellent job, going beyond impersonation to capture the essence of the man. In a character study of a public figure both widely parodied and unwittingly self-parodying, Stan gives us a more nuanced take on what makes him tick.

The most revealing scenes are Donald’s seeming distance from a family tragedy that he might have helped prevent had he been more giving, and his private display of grief, refusing to show vulnerability even to those closest to him. It’s the steady hardening of his nature that defines the characterization — the stern glare, the mouth set in a sullen pout, the sheer amount of physical space his persona takes up. Stan makes it plain that this is just as much a part of Trump’s performance as his own.

Abbasi and cinematographer Kasper Tuxon ( The Worst Person in the World ) give the movie a grainy texture that evokes the ‘70s and ‘80s, while the neon yellow main title credits instantly suggest vintage television. Bringing the era to life with tacky authenticity, Aleks Marinkovich’s production design lavishes particular attention on the vulgar ostentatiousness of Trump’s domain once he cracks the big time and Laura Montgomery’s costumes walk the line separating expensive from stylish or classy.

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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Two ancient titans, Godzilla and Kong, clash in an epic battle as humans unravel their intertwined origins and connection to Skull Island's mysteries. Two ancient titans, Godzilla and Kong, clash in an epic battle as humans unravel their intertwined origins and connection to Skull Island's mysteries. Two ancient titans, Godzilla and Kong, clash in an epic battle as humans unravel their intertwined origins and connection to Skull Island's mysteries.

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Chris hemsworth gets hollywood walk of fame star – and a ribbing from his fellow avengers, gerard butler in talks to re-team with christian gudegast for action adventure ‘empire state’ – cannes market hot project.

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EXCLUSIVE : Gerard Butler  is in talks to re-team with Den Of Thieves director Christian Gudegast in comedic action-thriller  Empire State,  about an attack on the iconic skyscraper.

In  Empire State , when the Empire State Building comes under attack by a military contractor hellbent on revenge, Navy SEAL turned NY firefighter Rhett (Butler) and NYPD Tactical officer Dani (yet to be cast) must put aside their relationship troubles as they work to rescue hostages and save the famous landmark.

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The  Empire State  script was written by S. Craig Zahler ( Bone Tomahawk ) and Brian Tucker ( Secret Invasion ).

CAA Media Finance will handle the domestic rights, while The Veterans is launching international sales at Cannes .

Butler and Gudegast are in post on  Den of Thieves 2: Pantera . Butler recently wrapped production on Universal Pictures’ live-action adaptation of the animation franchise  How To Train Your Dragon , reprising his role of Hiccup’s father Stoick. He is currently filming  Greenland: Migration , the sequel to Ric Roman Waugh’s apocalyptic action movie.

Gudegast also wrote  London Has Fallen,  which starred Butler and grossed over $200M worldwide.

Butler is represented by CAA and Alan Siegel Entertainment; Gudegast is repped by Entertainment 360 and Patrick Knapp; Zahler is repped by UTA and Range; and Tucker by CAA and David Fox.

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