Capsule Reviews: 'Venom: The Last Dance,' 'Woman of the Hour' & 'The Apprentice'

by Philip Price

Venom: The Last Dance

Photo: Sony Pictures

How did Venom get a trilogy and not Andrew Garfield?

​I kind of admire what Tom Hardy and the creative teams did with this trilogy of movies in that none of the three endeavors ever came close to what I expected/imagined a Venom movie to be, but I also experienced a series of existential moments while watching “Venom: The Last Dance” that had me questioning why we were doing this and what we were doing with this - least among them when the Oscar-nominated, BAFTA-winning Chiwetel Ejiofor yells, "Hey buddy, I’m talking to you!" at a ball of CGI symbiote.

There's a pretty good running gag involving shoes, and the musical cues overall are so generic they're hilarious - of course, Maroon 5 would sink to the level of licensing a song inspired by the death of their manager to a bad comic book movie intent on using it for comedic purposes - but having Rhys Ifans show-up in an alternate Spidey universe after portraying Curt Connors in the aforementioned Garfield films as a hippie dad to throw out lines like, "Long way to New York with naked shrimps, man..." is truly the cherry on top.

A wild road, indeed.

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Woman of the Hour

Photo: Netflix

The true life story of the encounter between Rodney Alcala and Cheryl Bradshaw on “The Dating Game” in 1978 was undoubtedly chosen as the subject for Anna Kendrick's directorial debut “Woman of the Hour” due to its emblematic nature of the risks women take every time they give a man a chance. At the risk of sounding radical, this choice - ultimatum almost - between options where it quickly becomes evident which holds the greater capacity to pervert the situation, Kendrick stages a simple but effective analogy of the quest to find love while remaining safe: an exchange that is a shame it has to be considered in the first place. I found the structure of the film inspiring as well.

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The Apprentice

Photo: Briarcliff Entertainment

When I read King Lear in high school, I remember trying, thanks in large part to “The Lion King” and “10 Things I Hate About You,” to imagine what a modern retelling would look like, and though not a one-to-one comparison, “The Apprentice” serves as a possibility of that type of adaptation. It holds that kind of ambition in its storytelling. Of course, the titular role in Shakespeare's play would be the Roy Cohn character here, which makes Ali Abbasi's film so interesting given the real-world context into which it has been delivered.

​In a post-‘Succession’ world where Donald Trump is overblown to the utmost degree, would a movie centered around Jeremy Strong's Cohn—where he gives the keys to his kingdom to this young man who flatters and pays homage to gain favor only for this successor to reject him and abandon Cohn once he has wrung out every possible reason for keeping him around—be the more successful film critically and commercially?

As someone who was unfamiliar with Cohn before this film and whose real introduction to Trump was “The Apprentice” TV show, I found the mad scientist/monster aspects of Gabriel Sherman's screenplay inherently fascinating, but even as Sebastian Stan somehow manages to credibly transform from a determined, almost innocent young real estate mogul into the Trump we know today I couldn't stop wondering what this might have looked like were it made in the vein of a true tragedy. I guess as much is only possible when your subject comprises more than what they present, though, which is impossible for a man whose entire life is centered around being a public figure.