David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds is a brainy, silky, sophisticated, deliberately paced, high-toned “horror” film for smart, well-educated people. I loved hanging with it…hanging in it.

Vincent Cassel, in great physical shape and adorned with a great silver be-bop pompadour haircut, is Karsh, a widower who’s devastated by the passing of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger). As a way of managing his grief he’s invented GraveTech, a cutting-edge technology that enables survivors to keep visual tabs on their loved ones as they rot in their tombs. I’m serious — that’s really what it’s about. Watching a loved one’s body slowly rot and decay. I was sitting there going “uhm…okay” and then it was “wait…really?”

I didn’t love the complex, slow-moving story but I adored the Cronenberg-ness…the handsome stylings, the discreet nudity, the sex, the flush vibe, the upscale Canadian atmosphere, the shadowy mood, the smart dialogue. Cassel, Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders…everyone brings their A-level game. That was enough for me.

Hollywood Elsewhere to Apprentice screenwriter Gabe Sherman and director Ali Abassi [12:10 mark] :

“Uhm, I just wanted to ask, particularly Gabe and Ali, about the amazing, for me, emotional moment when, having known about Roy Cohn a good part, part of my life…and believing and understanding that he was one of the most reprehensible human beings of the 20th Century, arguably…I just thought the movie does an amazing thing by actually making you feel sorry for him…empathy…when Trump basically screws him over, and I was just wondering if you had sort of tried to build to that emotional moment…whether that was a key strategy on your part.”

From this morning’s review of The Apprentice:

Who reunites with an old girlfriend, falls in love again, gets married, parades around and then two years into the renewed relationship decides that it was all an ill-considered impulse thing? Whoops!

We’ve all made the occasional mistake or acted intemperately with romantic partners, but who decides to get married twice (Las Vegas, Savannah) on a half-assed romantic whim…a whim that doesn’t hold up after a year or two? Who does this?

The cliche about love with a certain person being better “the second time around” is apparently untethered to the reality of human experience.

Never settle, never surrender. Attack, attack and counter-attack. And no matter how evil or slimey your situation may be, always claim victory and never admit defeat.

These were cherished, deeply-held principles that the late Roy Cohn, one of the most satanic figures of the 20th Century, adhered to during his early ’50s-to-mid ’80s heyday, and they were passed along with interest and relish to the young Donald J. Trump in the ’70s and early ’80s. God help us but Cohn’s lessons of avarice still live in Trump today, right now…fundamental poisons, the devil’s handbook, operational tricks of the trade.

Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice is the well-told story of Cohn and Trump’s master-mentor relationship, and God, it’s so much fun…so alive and entertaining and popping with the wicked pleasures of an evil life or attitude.

The Apprentice, which I saw late yesterday afternoon. saved me from my post-Horizon depression…a terrible black-dog, pit-of-my-stomach feeling that had taken me down, down, down. And then I saw Abassi’s fast, fleet and grainy tabloid dramedy and I was suddenly pulled out of the pit. I was chuckling and even laughing out loud, which I rarely do, and just fucking tickled to death. Thank you, God.

All hail Jeremy Strong‘s magnificent supporting performance as Cohn — he should definitely win the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor prize, the size of the role be damned — as well as Sebastian Stan‘s Trump, a note-perfect capturing of this amiable, malevolent psychopath, who apparently exuded a certain naivete and behaved in a semi-understandable fashion and may have been half-human when he was working in a senior capacity for his father’s real-estate company in the ’70s.

But that didn’t last.

Roy Cohn molded young Trump into the fiend he remains today…Cohn was the father, godfather and inspirational older brother Trump had never known while growing up. Fred Trump, Donald’s real-estate-tycoon dad, goaded him to succeed or at the very least bullshit his way through a tough racket but imparted a flinty, ruthless mentality in the process. Thanks, dad…fuck off.

Abassi’s direction is brash and brilliant, and Gabriel Sherman‘s screenplay (which was apparently cowritten by Jennifer Stahl, according to Wikipedia) is a model of no-bullshit economy — it gets right to the nub of things and never loses focus during the film’s 120-minute running time.

We’ve all been suffering through the plague of two-hour-plus films — the art of crafting an effective 100-to-110-minute narrative is apparently dead. But I would have been happy if The Apprentice had been Lawrence of Arabia. Okay, not that long but a 140- or 150-minute version would have felt like a neck massage, like a quaalude high. Keep it coming, feels so good.

The Apprentice has no distributor as we speak but please, please get this film into theatres as quickly as possible, and don’t wait for the fall — open it in July or certainly no later than August. Because it’s a huge pleasure pill that needs to be seen by as wide of an audience as possible. Very few adult films are this much fun. And if it gets seen quickly and widely enough, it might just save this country from four more years of hell. Maybe. Possibly.

There’s a bizarre passage in Tatiana Siegel‘s 5.20 Variety story about the already-infamous rape scene…the one that the late Ivana Trump shared and then denied in 2015 (obviously under pressure from Donald)…the one in which Donald throws Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova) to the ground during an argument and rapes her like a Cossack. As he’s ravaging her from behind, Trump hisses into Ivana’s ear, “Is that your G-spot…did I find it?”

Remember that Peter Coyote line from Jagged Edge when he describes Jeff Bridges‘ Jack Forrester character as “an ice man”? Well, Forrester had nothing on Trump, particularly when the latter began treating the heavily-closeted Cohn like shit when he began to succumb to AIDS symptoms.

Siegel quotes an “insider” saying that “audiences may find The Apprentice to be an oddly humanizing portrait” of Trump. Excuse me? Young Trump seems like a semi-tolerable fellow at first, but he gradually morphs into a toxic fuckhead…a killer. The truth is that Abassi’s film is an oddly humanizing portrait of Cohn as it invites the audience to share Cohn’s sense of betrayal…you actually feel sorry for this icon of evil when Trump gives him the cold shoulder.

Cohn to Trump at film’s halfway point: “You’ve got a fat ass. You should do something about that.” Strong is wonderful!

And by the way, Siegel reported yesterday that Dan Snyder, a billionaire Trump supporter who’s an investor in The Apprentice, is enraged at the damning portrait of Trump.

Variety excerpt: “Sources say Snyder, a friend of Trump’s who donated $1.1 million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign, put money into the film via Kinematics because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president. Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious.” Hard to believe anyone could be that clueless, but there it is.

Here’s a nice taste of yesterday’s Apprentice screening.

I’ll be hitting the Apprentice press conference at 11 am, and I may even catch Abassi’s film a second time this evening, just for fun. I also plan to catch Sean Baker‘s Anora at 3 pm today.

I went into this morning’s Horizon screening totally pumped. I wanted to embrace and celebrate a classic-styled American western, which is what the advance-word crowd has been calling it. I wanted to see Open Range 2: Westward Ho The Wagons. Give it to me, bruh…make it happen!

Alas, it pains me to admit that Kevin Costner‘s big-swing western isn’t all that good.

Costner said during today’s lunch-hour press conference that Horizon “is a journey…it’s not a plot movie.” But that’s exactly what I wanted! I wanted a solid, gripping wagon-train saga with a commanding narrative — the kind of movie in which characters say and do what they must because of who they are and what they need and so on. And that didn’t happen, and I’m all but weeping as as result. Seriously…real tears.

I don’t hate Horizon — it just doesn’t do the proverbial thing, and I feel crestfallen about that.

Costner’s 181-minute film is kind of a mess, truth be told. It feels like the start of a ten-part miniseries, and it just feels odd to be sorting through several characters and locales and situations over a three-hour period and asking “when is the actual movie going to start?”

Because this is a Hulu or Paramount Plus or Apple miniseries with a big movie star (i.e., Kevin), and his Gary Cooper-like character, Hayes Ellison, doesn’t show up until the 65-minute mark and he really doesn’t do or say a hell of a lot throughout the whole film except shoot a crazy-evil guy (played by Jamie Campbell Bower) at the halfway mark.

Maybe the “movie” will kick in when Part Two rolls along in August, but with the exception of a couple of rousing action scenes (my favorite is a moonlit horseback chase) the film I saw drifted and meandered and dragged at times. It does a whole lot of talk-talk-talking and scenery-gaping, and I felt kinda trapped watching all these unfamiliar faces rambling on and on. Why am I listening to you guys trying to sort stuff out? Who are you? Why should I care what you think about anything? You mean nothing to me.

You know who’s just as good as Costner, charisma- and authority-wise? Luke Wilson as wagon master Matthew Van Weyden. I was also down with costars Sienna Miller (although she’s really too pretty for the proverbial “room”), Sam Worthington, Jena Malone and Abbey Lee (ditto).

At times Horizon struck me as indecipherable and incomprehensible, due to the yokel accents. What the fuck is that character saying…what?

There are too damn many story lines, and way too much “acting.” And way too much familiar-sounding movie music, I felt. The composer shouldn’t have been John Debney, who plays it safe and square and music-cues just about everything. It should have been the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto, who passed last year.

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review: “There’s a hallowed place in cinema for multi-character dramas. But Horizon, simply put, doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries.

“Much of what happens is wispy and not very forceful; the film doesn’t build in impact, and it seldom seems to aim in a clear direction. And [this] feels like a major disappointment. As a stand-alone film (which it isn’t, but let’s pretend for a moment), Horizon is by turns convoluted, ambitious, intriguing, and meandering.

“But it’s never quite moving. It’s too busy laying down narrative tracks and hammering out the minutiae of situations that don’t feel like they’re leading anywhere special.”

One thing I was asking myself over and over was “why is the pacing so leisurely and lackluster?” I know, I know — because the foundational basics need to be established before the dramatic urgency kicks in three months hence. But I kept feeling I was suspended in a time vacuum. Nothing seemed to matter much.

Gleiberman: “Just about every Western of the studio era came in at two hours or less, and so did most of the revisionist Westerns (and some of those were complicated). There’s a reason for that. It’s all the time they needed.”

There’s a degree of irony, methinks, in Demi Moore starring in The Substance, a riveting David Cronenberg-ian body-horror flick about the fear of aging among older women and the application of artificial enhancements, when it’s been apparent for some time that Moore herself has been augmenting nature with the usual costly touch-ups.

Not that I have the slightest problem with this. Born during the Kennedy administration, Moore looks great (and I’m saying this as a veteran of three Prague procedures so don’t tell me) but c’mon…her character, an aging actress and workout-show host named Elizabeth Sparkle who injects herself with a radical youth drug, isn’t that far from self-portraiture.

Sparkle’s radical de-aging situation conveys a certain parallel or reach-back to Oscar Wilde‘s Dorian Gray, of course, but I’m also thinking of poor, anguished Norma Desmond. Imagine her post-Sunset Boulevard, non-mental-asylum life with the benefit of today’s plastic surgery techniques. She might not have wound up shooting William Holden‘s Joe Gillis, and he might have become Betty Schaefer‘s permanent writing partner!

(Who speculated that Gillis might have somehow been the father of American Gigolo‘s Julian Kaye? Was it David Thomson?)

Directed by Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is a whipsmart body-horror flick. Urgency, punch and pizazz feeds into this synthetic-feeling, slickly assembled piece of feminist (i.e., male-asshole-hating) agitprop, and obviously with a bullhorn message, to wit: Women, throw off the yoke of male assholery and their imposition of bullshit beauty standards and live for yourselves.

There are only two problems with The Substance.

One, it’s not just about Moore’s Sparkle de-aging herself after being fired from her TV show (i.e, too old) but about being replaced by Margaret Qualley‘s Sue, a 20something who emerges, Cronenberg-style, from within Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Sue have some kind of alternating arrangement in which they take turns strutting around in the big, bad city. And I couldn’t understand the rules…how and why of it all.

And two, the film goes on too long. It wore me down and I started glancing at my watch repeatedly….c’mon, wrap this up already.

The New Yorker‘s Justin Chang is calling The Substance “a shoo-in for the Palme d’Or.” Sure thing. If they gave to Titane, why not?

19 days ago I predicted that certain Cannes critics would take issue with Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (which HE is seeing on Monday morning, 5.20, at 8:30 am). The issue, I wrote, would be a complaint that the Native American side of the settler saga hasn’t been explored with enough thoroughness or deference.

From an early Horizon review by Screen Daily ‘s Lee Marshall:

“It’s curious that, almost 35 years on from Dances With Wolves — a revisionist Western that still feels radical in the way it reframed the genre’s moral and narrative point of view to Native American peoples — Costner has turned traditionalist in Horizon.

“That’s in the nature of the well-researched story, co-written by Costner and newcomer Jon Baird, which centers on the enormous challenges facing early settlers in the American West, who were trying to make a life in an untamed land which didn’t belong to them.

“But you choose your stories, and the single, underdeveloped narrative thread that is dedicated to a First Nation community here feels like a corrective, rather than a commitment.”



Either you get with the program and drop to your knees as you enthusiastically agree that Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez is a wowser transgender musical masterpiece, or you’re a sourpuss or a problematic person or worse (i.e., perhaps even a transphobe).

The Croisette cultists have spoken, and Greta Gerwig‘s jury is almost certainly going to go along. What choice do they have? I respect the impact factor — you can sense it, feel it.

And there’s no question that Karla Sofia Gascon, a trans biomale who plays the titular character, will be awarded the festival’s Best Actress prize.

Repeating: “Emilia Perez is certainly a nervy big-swing movie, and I’m certainly giving it points for this…it’s not an altogether fascinating film but is certainly one that fascinates from time to time…it’s up to something fairly novel in a wackazoid sort of way, and in my book there aren’t enough films of this sort so I’m definitely giving portions a solid pass.”

From David Rooney’s Hollywood Reporter review: “It’s highly probable that some will find the film too changeable to feel cohesive.”

Kevin Costner’s Campari Lounge sitdown with THR exec editor Scott Feinberg ended about 40 minutes ago. It lasted a good 65 or 70 minutes, and Costner looks so “movie star”, really great — radiant golden-gray hair, magnificent white suit, slender physique, cool black shades, sheepish grin. Plus he had the charm + candor levels turned up to 11.

While the Horizon director-star passed along many inspirational insights and some great stories about Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Robert DeNiro and Burt Lancaster, Feinberg’s meticulous, career-spanning questions appeared to drain Costner’s energy toward the end (“You’re gonna wear these people out”) and his patience was wearing thin (“Fuck, this is taking long!”, although he said so joshingly).

Quote: “Writing is the blood of what we do.” Quote #2: “I like movies the way you guys do…when the curtain opens I want something to happen…and I miss that curtain!” Quote #3: “I need some more money [to shoot parts 3 and 4 of Horizon with]…I really do, although I’ve shot three days’ worth of chapter 3 and when I get back I’ll be shooting another six days.” Quote #4: “When you go see Horizon and when the lights start to dim, go back to being a little girl or a little boy, close your eyes for two or three seconds, and then open them and go for a ride with me.”

We met in the down elevator after it ended. We’d gotten to know each other during the promotion of Mike Binder’s Black and White. Small talk, chit-chat. And it meant something (to me at least) when Kevin gave me a bro back-pat.