All hail Edward Norton for praising Ali Abassi‘s under-seen and under-heralded The Apprentice in an interview with THR‘s Scott Feinberg:

Posted by yours truly one week ago (12/14/25): “Industry-ites are afraid to praise The Apprentice because they’re cowards…plain and simple. I’ve been saying for nearly eight months that it’s a truly excellent film with superb performances by Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, but they’re afraid to acknowledge the quality because they don’t want to be seen as supportive of anything bearing any kind of Trump stamp, even though the film’s second half is quite condemning of the former and future president.”

HE’s Cannes review, posted eight months ago:

I knew less than 15 minutes in that I would loathe sitting through The Brutalist, for right off the top it struck me as a melancholy slog, a swamp thing…a movie populated with draggy characters and a draggier-than-fuck storyline. Lemme outta here.

Silly as this sounds, I came to believe that The Brutalist hated me as much as I was learning to hate it.

I looked at my watch and moaned…dear God, over three hours to go. I was nonethelss determined to at least make it to the halfway mark. I almost managed that.

From Richard Brody‘s “The Empty Ambition of The Brutalist”:

“The Brutalist is [fundamentally] a screenplay movie, in which stick figures held by marionette strings go through the motions of the situations and spout the lines that Corbet assigns to them—and are given a moment-to-moment simulacrum of human substance by a formidable cast of actors.

“The themes [of The Brutalist] don’t emerge in step with the action; rather, they seem to be set up backward.

“[For] The Brutalist is also a domino movie in which the last tile is placed first and everything that precedes it is arranged in order to make sure that it comes out right.”

Brody subhead: “Brady Corbet’s epic takes on weighty themes, but fails to infuse its characters with the stuff of life.”

Friendo: “Regarding your recent list of the best movies released in 1990, where the hell is Havana? Havana, Jeff! Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack, David Rayfiel!”

HE to friendo: “In my eyes, Havana is a solid, respectable, midrange redemption tale — a flawed character (Redford’s Jack Weil) puts aside selfish tendencies and winds up doing a selfless, noble thing for a woman he loves (Lena Olin‘s Bobby Durán) but can’t have. It left an agreeable taste in my mouth. I loved Rayfiel’s dialogue, shared with Judith Rascoe.

“But over the last 35 years I’ve never rented or streamed Havana, and that means something. My criteria was ‘which 1990 films are still really living in my head 35 years later?’ I remember it with earnest, moderate affection, but not a lot of fervor. It’s a romantic film, obviously, but afflicted with a tone of resignation.”

She’s so real for this pic.twitter.com/kJfzYGf1Co

— Kevin Jacobsen (@Kevin_Jacobsen) January 11, 2025

The last time I felt this shattered and emotionally affected by the word “gone” was over a half-century ago when ABC’s Jim McKay reported that every last Israeli athlete hostage had been killed. The Palisades fire deaths have been relatively minimal, thank fortune, but this time the word “gone” refers to the Hiroshima-level destruction of an entire town…thousands of blackened homes, destroyed lives. This was written Thursday (I think) by Holly Korbonski.

A miracle has happened. We managed to get to our property and our home, that we were told is gone forever, is still standing. In this hellish landscape “standing” is relative, but smoke and other damage is not like the utter destruction around us. The view from our deck area: pic.twitter.com/JZU2kTJC52

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) January 10, 2025

The President just committed to covering 100% of the fire management and debris removal costs for the next 180 days.

Thank you @POTUS for taking my call and having the back of Californians in our time of need. pic.twitter.com/1FW1QF6JXg

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) January 10, 2025

The first rule of obit etiquette is to never reveal what may have caused the demise of a recently dear and departed. But as I liked and greatly respected Michael Schlesinger, who occasionally shared comments on HE, I asked the other day what had happened.

“Mike had been laid up in the hospital for a while,” a colleague explained. “He checked in feeling weak overall, was admitted, given a room, and then just kept feeling weak. They couldn’t tell him why for quite some time.

“Eventually they diagnosed a cardiac condition. But then it was also discovered he had cancer, and that’s what finally took him out. It’s double awful that he had such a physically painful death, and that he went out without really understanding what had happened to him.

“He was an unfailingly standup guy who did a lot of wonderful work. For years he waved the flag of Budd Boetticher, even as generations of idiot Sony executives asked ‘Budd WHO?’ Eventually he got heard, and the Criterion Budd box is a testament to his perseverance.

“Last night I put on the Criterion Bluray of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and played his wonderful commentary, just to hear his voice.”

…but she can’t hide.