‘The Apprentice’
Is it just my imagination, or is “The Apprentice†a pretty interesting movie? Less than a month before a U.S. presidential election, you’d expect an eleventh-hour biopic on former president Donald Trump (which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival) to settle for cheap smears and a bunch of propaganda. “The Apprentice†works a little differently. It’s an actual, conflicted and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what made Trump Trump at an impressionable period in his rise. Disappointingly, “The Apprentice†settles too often for broader, less illuminating touches. The performers save the movie from itself. As Trump, Sebastian Stan captures just enough of the familiar externals — the pursing of the lips, the frequent check-in with the nearest reflective surface to see how his hair’s doing — without doing an impersonation.
2:00. 2 ½ stars.
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‘Piece by Piece’
A documentary about Pharrell Williams rendered entirely as a Lego movie? It’s understandable to be a bit skeptical of this gimmick, but in “Piece by Piece,†directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville, it’s a gimmick that works. In an introductory bit of conversation about the film between the subject and director, it’s explained how the Lego style affords the somewhat mysterious and inscrutable Williams a shield that allows him to let his guard down while sharing his personal story. It also comes to make thematic sense in the larger narrative about how he understands his life and the context in which he exists. Of course, the Lego style is also just fun, a spin on the usual biographical documentary which tells the story of a creative genius through talking-head interviews and archival footage. Everything here is Lego: the interviews, the music videos, the home movies, the scenes of Williams returning to his hometown of Virginia Beach to perform a homecoming concert. The style is funny and cute, and while it offers him a modicum of privacy, it also makes you want to revisit the real thing when the film is over.
1:33. 3 stars.
‘Saturday Night’
There’s an existential question that runs throughout “Saturday Night,†Jason Reitman’s love letter to the iconic “Saturday Night Live,†and its chaotic entry into the world on Oct. 11, 1975. People keep asking the show’s creator and producer, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), what, exactly, the show is. It’s a question he’s not able to answer until nearly the end of the movie, at about 11:15 p.m. The film, which starts at 10 p.m. and takes place over the course of the 90 minutes leading up to the very first live show, utilizes an ominous ticking clock to count down to showtime. Over the course of those 90 minutes (which the film, with a run time of 1 hour and 49 minutes, fudges a bit), whatever can go wrong already has, will or is in the process of going wrong, swirling around the calm eye of the storm, Lorne. Though “Saturday Night,†the film, feels ephemeral and somewhat fleeting, it represents something that has endured, and continues to, through the sheer force of will that is Lorne Michaels.
1:49. 2 ½ stars.
— Tribune News Service