borat family movie review

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” is a deliciously unstable comedy. This new installment in the misadventures of Cohen’s ignorant yet fearless Kazakhstani journalist Borat Sagdiyev is filled with risqué (and just plain risky) jokes. Some land. Others explode in the film’s own face like a baggy-pants comedian’s prop cigar. That’s all true to the spirit of Borat, for better and worse. Even gags that leave a troubling afterimage fit the star’s wise-ass, id-monster persona. You can’t open a comedic Pandora’s box and expect the results to be orderly and reassuring.

The story begins with Borat’s release from prison, where he spent 14 years atoning for his shenanigans in the previous film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of American to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” Borat is blamed for the country’s political and financial collapse (file footage shows a stockbroker trying to kill himself by jumping from the country’s tallest skyscraper, a second-floor office in a muddy village). Like a noncombatant pervert cousin of John Rambo, Borat is given a mission that will redeem and pardon him if it succeeds: he must journey to the United States in order to…

Actually, hold on. We shouldn’t get into that, because the described mission is wild and ludicrous and (Rambo-style) is immediately compromised. Let’s just say that it involves a monkey (actually a chimpanzee), and that when it doesn’t work out, Borat tries to mend fences between Kazakhstan and the United States by offering his only daughter, Tutar (Irina Nowak), as a prize to “Vice Premiere” Mike Pence , whose aversion to spending unsupervised time alone with women is chalked up to his voracious sexual appetite. Tutar, who was raised in captivity on Borat’s farm (like livestock, and Melania Trump, the movie insists), has a lot to learn about life, men, sex, and everything, because women aren’t allowed to read, learn, drive, or do anything else in her country. Her most treasured possession is a child’s bedtime book that depicts the vagina as a toothy maw that will, if touched, swallow the toucher’s whole body. (Irina Nowak is an incredible find, if indeed she’s a “find.” The closing credits claim that the movie is “introducing” her, but media outlets speculate  that she’s really Bulgarian actress   Maria Bakalova .)

There are a couple of other layers to the plot, revealed in due time. But as always, the gags and riffs and characterizations and cultural observations are the point—and the high failure risk, which lends a veneer of excitement even to the dumbest bits. As directed by Jason Woliner (“Nathan for You,” “Parks and Recreation”), and scripted by enough screenwriters to field the world’s least threatening rugby team, “Borat” stays focused on its core mission: positioning its hero as a depraved, narcissistic fool whose flaws and excesses mirror his clueless targets’ so closely that they don’t realize they’re being made fun of, even when Cohen stops just short of hauling out a sign that reads, “YOU ARE THE JOKE.”

At the heart of the film is the belief that, for all its posturing as The Greatest Nation on Earth, the United States circa 2020 has more in common with a retrograde foreign backwater than its government or people like to admit. Borat’s country is a kleptocracy that runs on fear, corruption, and theocratic pronouncements that never seem to apply to the people doing the pronouncing. The culture’s boundaries are set by a dominant religious sect, but their declarations of the importance of morality, ethics and mutual respect are contradicted by their private embrace (or tolerance) of cruelty, depravity, anti-intellectualism, and superstition, at least when practiced by members of their own tribe.

The horrible belly laughs that are generated when we see how Borat’s country treats women (as chattel conditioned to serve men from a young, even pedophilic age—one of Borat’s sons even changed his name to Jeffrey Epstein) ring hollow in the memory once we see Borat trying to position his barely-adolescent daughter as a human bribe in the US. A FedEx employee is privy to a fax exchange establishing Tutar as an underage concubine, but he doesn’t bat an eye; he might as well be overseeing the transfer of a deed to a 2015 Ford Fusion. A plastic surgery clinic doesn’t question Borat’s bringing in Tutar for Russ Meyer-scale breast implants, even though she’s so young that she needs dad’s permission; nor are they fazed when he tries to pay with a bag of cash. The subtext of a lot of the jokes is that the exploitation of women and girls, some below the legal age of consent, is an ingrained perk of being a financially comfortable adult man in the United States, as well as in countries that Americans like to paint as inferior.  

The highlight, or low-light, of the movie finds former New York mayor turned Trump advisor Rudy Guiliani participating in a TV interview in a hotel suite with a woman who represents herself as being 15 years old. Guiliani—whose mouth is ringed by pink-and-purple discolorations that suggest either a makeup disaster or the recent removal of an oxygen mask—fails to practice social distancing; coughs on camera; touches the interviewer’s hand and creepily flirts with her after learning she’s interested in older men; then follows her into an adjoining bedroom with the singleminded eagerness of a dog expecting a biscuit. The Zapruder deconstruction of what follows will vary, probably along partisan lines. What’s beyond dispute is that Giuliani’s behavior is the maraschino cherry atop the movie’s slime cake of male entitlement. His leer could be the film’s logo.

Q-Anon comes in for special ridicule by the film, and it’s quite pointed: the cult’s followers (represented by a couple of survivalist-types that Borat briefly stays with when he’s estranged from Tutar) agree with Borat that the Democrats are “demons” and the Clintons are “evil” exploiters, yet they gladly help Borat in his odyssey to deliver his daughter as a carnal prize to a member of the Trump administration. Borat’s explanations of his own troubles are dismissed as “a conspiracy theory” by men who believe that a secret, quasi-vampiric cult (a modern gloss on the ancient blood libel) controls the levers of power. The threat of state-approved murder hangs over Borat throughout, thanks to his government’s pledge to dismember him should his mission fail. But when Borat performs a song written by his two new buddies at a fair, the audience eagerly sings along with his lyrics about how Covid is “The Wuhan Flu” and the US should chop up journalists “like the Saudis do.” 

The movie’s scripted fiction mirrors the reality that the star captures when interacting with nonprofessionals: there is no agreed-upon morality, ethical code, or national fellowship in America. There is only greed, tribal loyalty, and power dynamics. Maybe that’s all there ever was. This is a dark, dark movie, invigorating in its bleakness.

Cohen “retired” Borat in 2007, saying that his disguise-driven brand of satire had become impossible due to his own fame and the instantaneous, identity-checking ability of search engines. And yet here he is fourteen years later, releasing a follow-up that was shot (mostly) under the radar during a pandemic. Some early scenes account for Cohen’s inability to work incognito in public: Borat, aka Cohen-in-character, gets recognized by random pedestrians, but their chasing and pestering him for autographs is chalked up to Borat’s infamy.

This launches a gallery of disguises that are like something Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau would’ve worn to fool the bad guys, only to arouse a different sort of suspicion. There’s a Soggy Bottom Boys-looking “hillbilly” outfit; a Donald Trump disguise that involves a fat suit and a “ Mission: Impossible “-caliber face mask and hairpiece; and a “Jew” costume (drawing on Borat’s own country’s history of antisemitism) with bat wings, talons, and a Pinocchio schnoz.

As you’ve gathered (“gathered”—like you’d be reading this if you weren’t already a Borat fan!) much of the humor is deliberately provocative/offensive/filthy, and while the script has a theoretically progressive agenda (as in Cohen’s TV series, and the last Borat film, the hero’s misadventures are meant to expose latent American bigotry, depravity, bloodlust, and authoritarianism), the result risks accusations that the creators are trying to eat their cake and have it, too. Is Cohen wallowing in American dysfunction by giving it so much screen time, even as he’s putting ironic quote-marks around Borat’s in-character “agreement” with it? Is he inadvertently creating YouTube clips and memes that bigots can strip of irony and self-awareness, and fold into the same old rancid propaganda? How responsible is Cohen for unintended consequences?

These are the conundrums faced by comics who incarnate a phenomenon that they want to critique. Some (like Andrew Dice Clay in the nineties) get swallowed up by it, to the point where they become advertisements for the thing they originally dismantled. That’s not the case here (yet). But Cohen’s always on the edge and sometimes tips over before catching himself (more so in “Bruno,” an often homophobic expose of homophobia).

On top of all of the movie’s theoretical/political aspects, something more conventional is going on. Although much of the movie is goofy, surreal and scathing, all of the sections that concentrate on Borat’s relationship with Tutar are heartwarming. It’s that Will Ferrell kind of heartwarming, though, where the script is making fun of the idea of “heartwarming” while still being heartwarming. Imagine the classic road film “ Paper Moon ” with the father and daughter replaced by sketch-comedy degenerates.

It’s fun to see contrary storytelling impulses layered on top of each other, even when (or maybe because) it’s hard to tell how much you’re supposed to accept at face value, and how much is a put-on. But even as Borat and Tutar become (comparatively) enlightened about culturally ingrained sexism in Kazakhstan and America, the film ties every element to a unifying idea: we think we’re making fun of the view through a window, but it’s a mirror.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat Sagdiyev
• Maria Bakalova as Sandra Jessica Parker Sagdiyev
• Mike Pence as Self
• Rudolph Giuliani as Self
• Judith Dim Evans as Self

Writer (story)

• Anthony Hines
• Nina Pedrad
• Erica Rivinoja
• Jena Friedman
• Peter Baynham
• Sacha Baron Cohen
• Craig Alpert
• James Thomas
• Michael Giambra
• Erran Baron Cohen
• Jason Woliner

Cinematographer

• Luke Geissbuhler

Writer (based on character created by)

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Borat: why subsequent moviefilm is great (& why the first one is still better).

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One of the more pleasant surprises to come out of 2020 was Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , a belated sequel to Borat that saw Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic creation returning to America to gift his teenage daughter to Mike Pence, only for his plans to be foiled by the spread of COVID-19 .

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Unlike most comedy sequels, the Borat follow-up satisfied fans of the original and was met with critical acclaim. It’s a great movie, but the first one is still arguably the best.

Subsequent Moviefilm Is Great: Borat Is Even More Relevant In 2020

The idea behind the Borat character is to present Americans with a wacky foreigner whose unabashed bigotry against women, the Jewish, and the Romani brings out their own prejudices. When Borat tells a rodeo cowboy that gay people are executed in Kazakhstan, the cowboy feels comfortable telling him that he believes the same thing should be done in America.

Back in 2006, the first Borat movie captured Bush-era America perfectly, but by 2020, in the age of Trump and QAnon and anti-maskers, a character that exposes ignorance had become even more relevant.

The First One Is Still Better: It’s Proven To Be Timeless

The release of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm inspired a lot of viewers to revisit the original movie, and most found that it had aged surprisingly well for a 14-year-old comedy whose main comedic currency is cultural ignorance. The first Borat movie has proven to be a timeless classic.

With its specific focus on the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election race, Subsequent Moviefilm might not play as well in 2034 as the first movie did 14 years after its release.

Subsequent Moviefilm Is Great: The Self-Awareness Adds An Interesting New Angle

The problem with a lot of comedy sequels is that they just rehash all the jokes from the first one . Borat Subsequent Moviefilm distinguishes itself from the first one by adding meta layers to Sacha Baron Cohen’s performance.

He considered retiring the character after the success of the first movie, because Borat had become too recognizable, and this problem was incorporated into the Borat universe in the sequel as the character had to disguise himself to conduct interviews.

The First One Is Still Better: It’s More Of A Social Experiment

Based on the “NOW VOTE” message at the end of the movie, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm had the specific goal of exposing important information that would influence voters in the U.S. election. The first movie is more vaguely defined in its politics. It’s a movie with its own story structure and character development, but it’s more of a social experiment to see how different people will react to a character like Borat.

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It’s not about making people look bad; whether the interviewees come out looking good, like the driving instructor who teaches Borat about consent, or bad, like the drunken frat boys who teach Borat about White Supremacy, is up to them.

Subsequent Moviefilm Is Great: The “Wuhan Flu” Song Is Genius

When Borat moves in with a couple of QAnon guys to ride out the coronavirus quarantine , they write a song about the virus being “a liberal hoax.” Then, at a far-right rally, he performs the song.

Seeing how many people at the rally sing along with lines like, “Inject him with the Wuhan flu,” and “Chop him up like the Saudis do,” in relation to figures like Obama and Dr. Fauci, is shocking and outrageous in the way that Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy is at its best.

The First One Is Still Better: It’s Tighter

In addition to being more than 10 minutes longer than the first movie, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm has long stretches with more exposition than laughs.

The first Borat movie is one of the tightest comedies ever produced . There’s a big laugh every couple of seconds and everything that isn’t A-material was shaved off in the cutting room. It’s a movie that always plays really well with a huge audience.

Subsequent Moviefilm Is Great: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ability To Never Break Character Is Impeccable

From Da Ali G Show to Who is America? , Sacha Baron Cohen has been tricking people into exposing their worst selves on camera for years now. The characters themselves are ingenious creations, and the scenarios he puts them in result in razor-sharp satire , but his most uncanny ability is the ability to never break character, no matter what his interviewees throw at him or how drastically out of hand a situation gets.

In Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , Baron Cohen manages to do all of that while simultaneously playing a character playing a character. He hides Borat’s recognizable traits in unrecognizable new characters and his subjects are none the wiser, but it’s clear as day to the viewer. It’s really impeccable.

The First One Is Still Better: A Looser Plot Resulted In Better Pranks

One of the biggest differences between the first and second Borat movies is that the second one has a much more rigid plot. The first one loosely follows Borat’s road trip across the U.S. to marry Pamela Anderson, but the second one has the goal of delivering Tutar to Mike Pence and the stakes that Borat will be killed if he fails.

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This meant that a lot of the pranks had to facilitate plot points in addition to duping unwitting Americans. In the first movie, that was always the priority, and it resulted in better pranks.

Subsequent Moviefilm Is Great: Maria Bakalova Is Incredible

Usually, when Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentaries have a co-star, they’re a deadpan foil for his wacky characters, like Gustaf Hammarsten as Lutz in Brüno . But for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , he found his match in Maria Bakalova .

From getting Rudy Giuliani to fumble around in his pants to preaching the joys of masturbation to a Hillsborough Republican Women’s Club meeting, Bakalova is every bit the master prankster that Baron Cohen is.

The First One Is Still Better: It Was A Game-Changer

With an unprecedented worldwide box office haul of more than $260 million, Borat turned out to be a surprise blockbuster back in 2006. The best lines were quoted by audiences for years to come. The success of Borat contributed to changing the face of comedy in the mid-2000s.

The sequel made a huge splash last year with its ultra-relevant satirical targets and viral moments like the Giuliani interview, but it was nowhere near the cultural phenomenon of the first one.

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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Brings Back Borat, With His Daughter in Tow

The brilliance and the horror of Sacha Baron Cohen ’s oeuvre is what his gonzo comedy elicits in others. For the bulk of his career, Cohen’s preoccupation has been using his elaborate personas—Ali G, Bruno, and of course, Borat Sagdiyev, the star of catchphrase-spawning Borat and its sequel debuting Friday on Amazon Prime, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm —to catch the wild American in their natural habitat, subjecting them to absurdity and catching their response on camera. In Subsequent Moviefilm , the so-called Kazakh journalist is sent back to America, 14 years later, to curry the favor of international strongman “Mc Donald Trump ” by presenting a gift to his “vice premier,” “Mikhael” Pence . The gift is a monkey named Johnny.

In most ways, the sequel follows the path of the original: Borat, misogynist boor, inflicts himself on the unsuspecting, goading them into admitting their own racism, sexism, or sheer stupidity. It can be both deeply uncomfortable and weirdly satisfying to feel the embarrassment Cohen seems pathologically inured to as he shamelessly bludgeons both his subjects and the viewer with pure, unadulterated awkwardness. But this time, Borat has a companion: his daughter Tutar ( Maria Bakalova ), a feral 15-year-old whose chief desire is to acquire a glorious “wife cage” like her idol, “Queen Melania .” Bakalova has the same nerves of steel as Cohen, seemingly incapable of embarrassment or shame. Together the duo attempt to find Pence and/or other members of the Trump administration, even as the coronavirus pandemic begins to sweep across America.

Borat’s frattiest fans might despair of having a girl in their clubhouse, but Bakalova is a crucial and excellent addition to the Borat schtick. She gives Cohen a shred more credibility for saying the terribly misogynist things he does—and as Borat Subsequent Moviefilm capitalizes on multiple times, offers the filmmakers twice as much access for getting their gotchas. 

The most outrageous moment in the film is a clip already released in advance of premiere , in which Tutar accidentally ingests the plastic baby on top of a cupcake—then takes her woes to the Carolina Pregnancy Center, where a pastor named Jonathan Bright counsels that the baby is “living and breathing” inside her. Cohen intervenes, saying that he is her father, and he’s the one that put the baby there—oh, you see the excruciating place this is going. Later the pair go to a debutante ball, where one of the other fathers says Tutar is easily worth $500, and to a plastic surgeon, where they request that Tutar get augmentation to make her worthy of a “sex attack.” Together they are a cunningly well-laid trap for the worst sort of sexualized paternalism, and repeatedly, they find creeps ready to take the bait.

This comes to an astonishing head in the final escapade of the film. Possibly because the pandemic squashed some of their plans, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm loses its head of steam in the last act; Tutar and Borat are separated. While Tutar pursues a career as a journalist, Borat quarantines with Jim Russell and Jerry Holleman , two Trump voters who think the Democrats are a worse threat than the coronavirus (which they say, by the way, is a hoax). But eventually the plot snaps back into place: Tutar sets up an interview with Rudy Giuliani . She meets the former mayor of New York and current adviser to the president in a hotel room, where he holds her hands, compliments her appearance, and follows her to the bedroom. She spends some time elaborately taking off their microphones; briefly, he lies down on the bed. His hand is in his pants . Watching it, your brain turns into an exclamation point. They are strategically interrupted before more transpires, but you cannot help wondering exactly what Giuliani may have done next. (Shortly after the event, which took place in July, Giuliani called the cops on Cohen.)

The funny thing about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is that for all of its childish pranks, it features multiple scenarios where Cohen’s unsuspecting subjects can’t be fooled out of their basic human decency. Late in the movie, Borat drops Tutar off with a babysitter named Jeanise Jones , who responds to Tutar’s hyperbolic ideas about women in society with some old-fashioned consciousness-raising. She shows Tutar that women can drive and make their own decisions; when Tutar tries to “defend” what her “father” has “taught” her, Jones responds straightforwardly, “Your daddy is a liar, okay?” (If she only knew.) In another scene, Borat enters a synagogue “dressed as a Jew”—which, uh, it might be anti-Semitic to even describe what he’s wearing—only to be faced with two gray-haired women who rapidly dismantle the irony he’s armored himself with. “Look at me, I’m Jewish,” says one, with the softest, warmest voice. It is a little version of Shylock asking if he does not bleed. (The woman, Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans , died shortly thereafter; the credits end with a dedication to her.)

There are inescapable frustrations with Cohen’s methods. His schtick is often more deeply uncomfortable than laugh-out-loud hilarious, and at times his humor comes across as cruel practical jokes. And of course there is the continued scapegoating of Kazakhstan, which really has nothing to do with Cohen’s persona (the scenes purportedly filmed there are in fact shot in Romania), but is still unwittingly implicated in his work. The country seems to be singled out for its obscurity; the average American does not know where either Kazakhstan or Romania is, making Borat a generalized foreign caricature—a misogynist, anti-Semitic, unwashed third-worlder, the fulfillment of every imagined stereotype. This is a pity for Kazakhstan, which then and now is subject to slander. But hopefully the country can forgive Cohen, and now Bakalova, for using its name as a tool to uncover the exact same ugliness within the American psyche.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan also has a major problem: It’s that 2020 so rapidly outpaced its jokes. In the ending montage that is “back in Kazakhstan,” the film finds a few new, funny ways to slice at the American coronavirus response, and introduces Cohen in the “maskini,” which he is wearing on the official movie poster. But you can almost feel the bits and gags left on the table as the production scrambled to reorient the film around the pandemic. They do a good job tying up the loose ends of the narrative to make the story work, but it’s only at the very end that Borat discovers QAnon and interfaces with anti-maskers, who exceed expectations for the depraved sentiments you might expect them to espouse. 

On the other hand, Borat’s stunts are well suited to public gatherings—there’s a notable effort at CPAC 2020, which was held in February—and we don’t have those anymore. Or to be exact, we don’t have them safely . But as the world gets dumber and dumber, there seems to be a greater need for Cohen’s sneaky way of finding the funny—which has itself gotten more pointedly political over the last few years. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is his first project after the Showtime docuseries Who Is America? , where his team managed to get former vice president Dick Cheney to autograph a “waterboarding kit.” In a moment where no one in power seems to have quite enough shame, perhaps only the truly shameless among us can find a way to thoroughly embarrass them.

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• Sacha Baron Cohen’s <i>Borat</i> Sequel Arrives in a Different America—and Works Even Better Than It Did 14 Years Ago

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat Sequel Arrives in a Different America—and Works Even Better Than It Did 14 Years Ago

W e think we want humor to be safe, as we want most things in life to be safe. But good humor can sometimes cut. The point is to make us uncomfortable , to make us wonder—in that space of floating time right after we blurt out a laugh—if Funny Person X, whoever that might be, has gone too far this time, has crossed the threshold into terrible taste or, worse, cruelty. Thinking too much about how and whether a joke works is a good way to knead it into right into oblivion. But sometimes, asking after the fact, “Why did I laugh at that?” is the best way to take our own temperature in the here and now, maybe even to see what needs to change in ourselves or the world around us.

I laughed and laughed through every joke of questionable taste and possible rudeness in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. And then I laughed some more. Some of this was bitter laughter at the way our intrepid Kazakhstan reporter Borat Sagdiyev—an alter-ego of Sacha Baron Cohen , returning, after 14 years, with a sequel to Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan —reveals ugly and unruly truths about contemporary American culture. Some was mildly shameful laughter, as I thought of Michelle Obama’s entreaty to go high when others go low : was I going too low by laughing at Cohen’s undercover skewering of fervent QAnon believers , racist alt-righters , moneyed white Southerners enjoying a debutante ball and, last but surely not least, a lascivious Rudy Giuliani ? Other times I laughed simply because I was awestruck. A fertility dance executed during a female character’s time of the “moon blood,” as Borat puts it? There is no sequence like this anywhere else on film—the only thing I can think of that comes close in its audaciousness is the tampon teabag in Catherine Breillat’s 2004 Anatomy of Hell . I laughed til I wept.

The 2006 Borat: Cultural Learnings made Cohen—an English-born, Cambridge-educated actor and satirist who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the American Civil Rights Movement—a very famous man. It also caused many to question his techniques . Posing as a hapless yet overconfident reporter from an aggressively underdeveloped country (the nation of Kazakhstan could hardly have been happy about that ), Cohen’s Borat, a kind of naïf-bully in an ill-fitting gray suit and cheap loafers, had gained access to his subjects through rather dubious means. By making them think they’d be appearing in a documentary, Cohen lured both regular Americans (many, but not all, from the South or the Midwest) and powerful ones (like former Congressman Bob Barr, of Georgia) into his snare. As Borat, he’d earn his subjects’ confidence and get them to agree with his homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic or otherwise bigoted rhetoric. He exposed Americans at their worst, even beneath their friendly veneer. But even if many of Cohen’s subjects deserved what they got, there were streaks of cruelty in his approach. Some of the people he’d punked had been incredibly kind to him, opening their homes to the awkward, blundering journo from another land, even giving him advice on how to use toilet paper. The 2006 takeaway from Borat: Cultural Learnings was that Americans can be terrible—and yet, even so, sometimes generous.

In the time since, we Americans elected a charismatic, principled statesman as president, twice; he also happened to be the country’s first Black president, breaking a barrier that, some thought, would be the beginning of the end of racism in America. We followed up that eight-year streak by electing a down-at-the-heels television star who’d bamboozled the public into thinking he was a successful billionaire , a man who has failed to denounce white supremacists , instituted policies that put children in cages , used his office to run roughshod over the rule of law, and caused through his negligence and disregard for science the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. Somehow, in 2020, Cohen-as-Borat’s approach—of going out into the world and teasing out threads of bigotry and hypocrisy in ordinary American citizens, as well as some not-so-ordinary ones—seems less cruel than it did in 2006. Which says more about us than it does about Cohen.

So, yes, I laughed, from the very beginning of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm . (The film’s director—or perhaps ringleader is a better word—is Jason Woliner.) Borat kicks off the film by explaining, in voiceover, his post-2006 fate: Because he failed in his mission to make benefit once glorious nation of Kazakhstan —a goal that, in retrospect, seems like a futuristic satirical blast at the MAGA slogan—he has spent the last 14 years sentenced to hard labor. But the country’s premier, upset that he’s been left out of the Big Boys’ club of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong-un, Bolsonaro, et al, frees Borat so he can send him on a special mission: to earn the American president’s respect, Borat will deliver a special gift to Vice President Mike Pence . Spoiler: It’s a monkey. Borat, happy to be freed from the gulag, spruces himself up, packs his best tighty-whiteys and heads back to America. But an accident occurs en route: the special gift monkey, who’d been shipped in his own deluxe crate, is DOA. And inside the crate there is also a stowaway: Borat’s 15-year-old daughter, Tutar (played by a marvelous newcomer, Maria Bakalova), a near-feral child who idolizes the woman she calls Princess Melania. Tutar longs to be, like Melania, a princess in a golden cage—which is not such a big dream, considering the movie’s running gag concerning the Kazakhstan Ministry of Agriculture and Wildlife’s recommendation that women be kept in cages most of the time.

Tutar has been nothing but a disappointment to Borat—back home, he’d berated her, calling her “the oldest unmarried woman in Kazakhstan.” But knowing he’ll be executed if he returns home having failed in his mission, he decides to groom Tutar as a gift to Pence. And as it turns out, she is a much better present than a monkey: Tutar becomes a babe, a manufactured bombshell with harsh blond hair and smoky black eye makeup. Borat takes her shopping, asking the saleswoman to direct them to the “No means yes” section. He escorts her to an old-fashioned southern cotillion, to learn how young women should be properly presented to society. (It is here that the aforementioned fertility dance takes place—consider this a warning.) Soon thereafter, he learns that Pence will be speaking nearby. Dressed as the man he calls McDonald Trump, with requisite fat suit, he sneaks into the Conservative Political Action Conference with his daughter slung over his shoulder, jubilantly announcing his intentions: “Michael Pen-is! I brought the girl for you!”

For this scene, Cohen really did interrupt Pence’s remarks at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland, this past February. (The “woman” slung over his shoulder was in reality a life-size doll, and he was escorted from the venue by security.) In real life, as in the movies, Borat is too famous to walk around in his trademark gray suit, so in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , he dons an array of disguises: dressed in farmer’s overalls and a shaggy fake beard, he shows up at an alt-right rally. (Again, this was a real-life rally , in Olympia, Washington, crashed by Cohen in June. It’s worth noting that much of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was shot during the pandemic, and although Borat is maskless through nearly all of it, the film’s credits do include a COVID-compliance officer.) From the stage, Borat leads the crowd in a song that advocates injecting “the Wuhan flu” into Barack Obama, Anthony Fauci, and anyone who wears a mask to prevent the spread of COVID. He ups the stakes in a subsequent chorus, getting the crowd to laugh and sing along as he advocates that journalists be chopped up, “like the Saudis do.” You could argue that Cohen is riling up the crowd under false pretenses. But if these pretenses are false, what would the proper ones be? This poison is already coursing through these ralliers’ veins; Cohen-as-Borat is just drawing it out.

There’s poison everywhere. Tutar, emboldened by the freedoms on offer to American women, reinvents herself as a television journalist and snags an interview with Rudy Giuliani—the real Rudy Giuliani—who by all appearances seems ready to succumb to her charms. She flirts with him conspicuously, yet also in a rather unschooled way. He laps at the bait, almost literally.

Cohen isn’t solely fixated on ugliness. Borat finds some American generosity too: Dressed as an exaggerated and clearly anti-Semitic idea of Jew—with pointed talons, devil wings and an elaborately crooked and elongated nose—he slips into a synagogue, where two women, despite his clearly wackadoodle appearance, greet him with warmth and kindness. One of these women, Judith Dim Evans, died as the movie was being completed, and Cohen honors her with a mention at the end of the credits. In just one staggering example of how easily Cohen’s intent can be misread—he himself is an observant Jew and an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism and Holocaust deniers—Evans’ family, without having seen the film, has filed a lawsuit against him. They claim that Evans was tricked into participating in a documentary that mocks “the Holocaust and Jewish culture.”

Cohen must know from experience that he’s playing with fire. So why does he again stick his hand right in it, 14 years later? Now isn’t just the right time for a Borat sequel; it may be the only time. In 2006 Cohen’s skewering of Kazakhstan as an economically and socially backwards country seemed like a cheap shot. But now America is itself a country facing backwards, the kind of democratically challenged nation we used to look down upon with pity. That reality isn’t lost on Cohen, and it shouldn’t be lost on us, either. If Borat Subsequent Moviefilm makes you laugh, what does your laughter say about you? My laughter told me—reminded me—how angry I am. As 2020 rounds to a close, I have zero sympathy for white Americans who are happy to show kindness to a stranger—just as long as that stranger, too, is white. I have zero tolerance for a presidential lackey who’d do anything he could to derail an election. And I have zero use for racist thugs whose greatest fear is that their guns will be taken away from them. If Sacha Baron Cohen gets you singing along joyfully to a phony racist, anti-journalist, anti-science anthem, then the joke is on you. And it ought to be.

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‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ Review: More Cultural Learnings

It’s an amusingly harebrained scheme, but there’s nothing in this moviefilm that matches the elegant social experiment of the first.

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By Devika Girish

In the 2006 movie “Borat,” an American humor coach explains the concept of a “not” joke to Borat Sagdiyev, the disarmingly moronic Kazakh journalist played by Sacha Baron Cohen . “We make a statement that we pretend is true, but at the end, we say, ‘not,’” the coach explains. But Borat struggles to grasp the pause required to make the joke work. First he pauses for too long before “not”; then, too briefly. The joke falls flat.

Baron Cohen’s postmodern comedy hinges on that pause. Traveling through America as a bigotry-spewing buffoon, he confronts people with a series of “not” jokes posed as ethical litmus tests. He’s an anti-Semite … not. He’s a misogynist … not. He’s an ignorant foreigner … not. If you can detect the pause, you’re the audience for the joke; if you can’t, you’re its butt.

In the long-awaited sequel, “ Borat Subsequent Moviefilm ” ( streaming on Amazon ), Baron Cohen and the director Jason Woliner bring that guerrilla concept back into a strange new world. Borat emerges as if from a time capsule: All these years, the film’s nudgy-winky opening montage tells us, he’s been serving time for embarrassing Kazakhstan with his prior exploits. But now, he’s being dispatched to America again to curry favor with President “McDonald” Trump. In an inspired (and ludicrously contrived) turn, he has a new partner in his madcap mockumentary: his 15-year-old daughter, Tutar (played by Maria Bakalova ), whom he plans to gift to “Vice Premier” Mike Pence as a gesture of good will.

It’s an amusingly harebrained scheme, but there’s nothing in this moviefilm that matches the elegant social experiment of the first, which sought to explore where precisely American civility departs from morality. The problems with the sequel start right at the beginning. Borat is too recognizable in the U.S. now, so to pull off the same pranks, he has to disguise himself heavily, as Baron Cohen did on his 2018 TV show , “Who Is America?”

These often ridiculous costumes ( including a memorable one at a conservative conference ) undercut the film’s promise of revelation — one that already feels compromised by the age of media manipulation and disinformation that we live in. The test is no longer of civility, but of gullibility. In one extended gag, Borat spends some days living with followers of QAnon, who scoff at his outrageous fabrications, but respond with their own conspiracies about bloodlusty, Satan-worshiping cults. Unlike the curiosity that seemed to motivate Baron Cohen in the previous film, here the goal appears to be to goad people to confirm what we already know.

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We Should Be Glad Borat Still Exists

Fourteen years ago, Sacha Baron Cohen slid the cathartic comic dagger of Borat into the soft tissue where American civility met American bigotry. His marks were often passive, acquiescent, polite, even when they had their suspicions … but then, their guards lowered and their ids unleashed in the presence of this dim-witted foreign journalist with his monstrously medieval beliefs, they hanged themselves with their own horrific words and actions. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan landed like a cinematic neutron bomb back in 2006, even launching a series of lawsuits from some of its unsuspecting, humiliated subjects. That film still holds up, only today it plays like both a time capsule and an unheeded warning about just how fucked up we truly were. So, now that we’ve fully become a nation of busybodies who outright despise each other, is there any room left for a Borat sequel?

Yes and no. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan offers its share of shameless stunts and at least one climactic earthshaking self-immolation from a major political figure (I won’t spoil it here, even though you’ll be hearing about it soon enough), but it also reveals the limitations of Baron Cohen’s shtick. For starters, people recognize his character now. When Borat, having been released from a gulag by Kazakh strongman Nursultan Nazarbayev (Dani Popescu) and sent to America on a mission to give Vice-President Mike Pence a pet monkey, first arrives in Texas, people chase him down the street and ask for his autograph. As a result, much of the film features Baron Cohen as Borat in disguise as other people — usually, some variation on a lumbering, bearded American rube with a Prince Valiant haircut, which is somehow both on point and not quite as funny as Borat himself.

Secondly, this Borat has an actual story, with actual character arcs and actual emotional turning points and whatnot. The monkey never arrives in the U.S. because it is eaten by Borat’s 15-year-old daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova), who has stowed away in the same shipping container as the creature. So Borat decides to gift his daughter to Pence, America’s “Vice Pussy Grabber.” This news makes Tutar much excite : Having grown up watching Cinderella -style animated fairy tales of the Donald-Melania romance, she has dreams of marrying a rich old American politician and being kept in a nice cage just like Queen Melania. And yes, they do go to a farm supply store to buy a cage for her. And yes, the owner does high-five Borat about all the Mexicans Donald Trump can fit in one cage. And yes, Borat does look at some propane tanks and asks the owner, “How many gypsies can I finish with one canister?” And yes, the owner does reply, “How many you got in the van?”

This is the Borat shuffle, and it still works in a country where everything is transactional and the customer is always right. Borat and Tutar go into a bakery and ask for a cake with the words “Jews will not replace us” on it — no problem. A plastic surgeon, prompted only briefly by Borat, goes into a long analysis of what a Jewish nose looks like. A tanning-salon attendant gamely answers the question of what spray-tan color is best “for a racist family.” A dress-store owner chuckles when Borat asks for “the ‘No Means Yes’ section.”

Amid all the antics involving real-life people, however, the film finds a surprising amount of room to explore the Borat-Tutar relationship. That, of course, allows Borat to grow, as his daughter discovers that women can in fact drive cars and read books and drink out of things that aren’t doggy bowls. This would be a deadly narrative choice — it’s a mockumentary designed to get real people to reveal themselves as ignorant dolts, who cares about two actual performers play-acting against each other as ignorant dolts? — were it not for Bakalova’s voracious energy and immersion in the part. Especially given the wink-wink, larger-than-life self-awareness of Baron Cohen’s performance (which is why it’s still incredible that anyone takes Borat seriously), Bakalova’s total commitment to the bit sometimes lulls us into thinking of Tutar as a real person caught in one of the comedian’s ridiculous ruses. In fact, her performance goes even further: She makes the film’s most absurd moments work dramatically, bringing real emotional gravity to the role of a young woman learning that her vagine will not in fact suck her in and kill her if she dares touch it. As a result, the Borat-Tutar dynamic has real tenderness. (People have noted Shakespeare likely wrote King Lear during a long-ago plague. It now appears that Sacha Baron Cohen has created his own insane twist on Lear during this current pandemic.)

There is plenty of political outrage here, too, if that’s what you’re looking for — and let’s face it, it is. A brief stop at a CPAC convention (filmed in late February) lets us glimpse Mike Pence just long enough to hear him smugly puff his chest about how the U.S. only has 15 coronavirus cases. A visit to a crisis pregnancy center demonstrates the extent to which they’ll go (and the actual crimes they’ll overlook) to try and convince women not to have abortions. In one of the movie’s most remarkable sequences, Borat shacks up for a few days with a couple of right-wing conspiracy nuts who, in between explaining to him what QAnon is, describe how the Democrats and the Clintons created the coronavirus. All that outrage is offset by some humanity, too: When Borat visits a synagogue, dressed in a truly bizarre “Jew” costume (hook nose, long claws, black tights, money bags), a kind elderly woman immediately engages him. It’s a weirdly heartwarming scene, until you realize that she probably knows how to defuse the situation because she’s been here before. Sure enough, she turns out to be a Holocaust survivor.

Borat 2 may not hit quite as many shocking comic highs as the first Borat , but it probably coheres more as a film — ironic, given that it appears to have been written, produced, and edited in record time, during a global crisis — and it also manages to walk a fine line between offense and revelation. There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about whether a movie like the original Borat could be made in today’s hypersensitive times. After initially taking offense at the character, Kazakhstan appears to have made its peace with him. But of course, Borat was never actually Kazakh. Baron Cohen’s character speaks a combination of Hebrew and Polish. The scenes in his hometown were shot in a Roma village in Romania, using local extras. The movie was banned across much of the Arab world. Much of the music used comes from Croat-Serb composer Goran Bregović’s sublime scores for the films of director Emir Kusturica, who still considers himself Yugoslav. Borat himself feels like he was modeled after Mahir Çağrı, a mustachioed, Speedo-friendly Turkish journalist whose goofy home page turned him into one of the world’s first internet celebrities back in the late 1990s. (Mahir actually sued Baron Cohen at one point — but then again, who didn’t?)

In other words, Borat always represented an imaginary Pan-Balkan–Central Asian–Middle Eastern other who embodied the prejudices and retrograde beliefs the West often unfairly ascribed to those cultures. (This is why I broke out in hives when I first saw him on Da Ali G Show. ) And his gambit was always to turn the tables on those who dared judge him, to show how once you scratched their amiable surfaces, America’s supposedly enlightened etiquette consultants and southern gentlemen and sales associates and college students and doctors and politicians turned out to be just as bigoted and primitive as Borat was. Only he was a fake man from a fake land and they were real people from a real society.

And now here he is again. He’s still fake and we’re still real. If his bite isn’t quite as sharp as it was before, it’s because the world has caught up to, and in some cases surpassed, his phony lunacy. So, no, we don’t actually need Borat anymore. But we should still be glad he exists.

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Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm First Reviews: Predictably Offensive and Hilarious, but Also Surprisingly Sentimental

Critics say sacha baron cohen is as outrageous as ever, but there's a surprising amount of heart in the film, and newcomer maria bakalova is a fantastic find..

TAGGED AS: Amazon , Amazon Prime , Amazon Prime Video , Amazon Studios , movies , streaming

Is it “very nice,” as he would say? Initial reviews indicate that yes, the follow-up mostly lives up to the original in its shock and hilarity while actually surprising viewers with its tenderness and especially a scene-stealing newcomer who plays Borat’s daughter.

Here’s what critics are saying about Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm :

Does it live up to the original?

Every bit as hysterically funny and shockingly outrageous as its predecessor. –  Doug Jamieson, The Jam Report

A laugh-out-loud-funny sequel that’s every bit the equal of — and arguably something more than — its 2006 predecessor. –  Peter Canavese, Groucho Reviews

A hilarious endeavor not far removed from the hijinks and antics of its predecessor. –  Nate Adams, The Only Critic

A parody on par with the original… Borat has lost none of his bite. –  Peter Debruge, Variety

The rare comedy follow-up to equal the hilarity, and outraged power, of its predecessor. –  Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

It doesn’t have the full capacity to land like the original did, but it’s most definitely a worthy follow-up. –  Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

Is  Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm  as good as the original? No. It’s certainly not. It isn’t really in the same league. But is that even really a fair question? –  Matt Oakes, Silver Screen Riot

Falls short of its imperfect but zeitgeist-grabbing 2006 predecessor in several ways. –  John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

(Photo by ©Amazon)

Is it more of the same?

Does Borat still say “ mai waif ,” and is it still funny? The answer, for the most part, is yes. – Jon Dieringer, Screen Slate

All you want to do is see Borat cause chaos…. When he does so, it’s still pretty spectacular. – Kyle Pinion, ScreenRex

The film is entertaining, but that’s what you’d expect from Cohen. However, the film can’t escape from its lack of originality. – Dewey Singleton, AwardsWatch

Borat 2 is largely the same design, slightly tweaked for a modern age, but never as politically or socially relevant as you’d expect. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

How is it different?

It’s applied more purposefully and selectively this time around, with a partisan political bent absent from the original feature’s free-for-all offending. – Charles Bramesco, Little White Lies

More than half of the film’s gotcha scenes feature him donning cartoonishly “American” disguises… Even with this hindrance, Borat’s central gimmick continues to work astoundingly well. – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

What elevates moments of the sequel above the original movie is that there are sketches that prove to be endearing. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

There is actual heart in this film… It adds a compelling tonal complexity to the piece that also enhances the themes without getting in the way of the comedy. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

Unlike the first movie, this outrageous sequel actually manages to show off the best [that humanity has to offer] as well. – Charlie Ridgeley, ComicBook.com

But is it different enough to convert new fans?

Offensive, frequently shocking and often breathtaking… for Borat fans, that’ll be very nice. For anyone else, you need to stay as far away as possible because it’s not for you. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

There are a couple of cringe-worthy moments, depending on how much of Cohen’s crude humor you’re willing to put up with. – Matt Rodriguez, Shakefire

Is it funny?

I haven’t laughed this hard at a film in years… [It] contains one of the funniest sequences ever committed to film. – Doug Jamieson, The Jam Report

It’s every bit as nerve-wracking as it is funny, and it happens to be one of the funniest films in years. – Charlie Ridgeley, ComicBook.com

Those on Cohen’s wavelength will savor each of these 96 minutes, with a joke rate that blows even  Airplane!  out of the water. – Peter Canavese, Groucho Reviews

There’s no limit to how far Cohen will go, and while it’s funny, it’s also terrifying knowing that there are people out there who truly believe his character. – Matt Rodriguez, Shakefire

How is Maria Bakalova as Borat’s daughter?

Maria Bakalova is everything that the movie needs. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

Matching Cohen for each pound of flesh, Bakalova is a revelation. – Matt Oakes, Silver Screen Riot

Brilliant… She brings a freshness that is sometimes lacking from Borat’s repeated catchphrases. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

One of the most fearless performances in screen comedy history. – Charles Bramesco, Little White Lies

Baron Cohen’s film also contains a strong feminist message thanks to the introduction of the brilliant newcomer Marina Bakalova. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Are the unscripted segments satisfying ?

The film’s meat-and-potatoes candid camera stunts are more of a mixed bag. – Jon Dieringer, Screen Slate

Scripted scenes together don’t work quite as well as when they’re pranking people. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

I found myself disappointed by the relative lack of Cohen’s unscripted brilliance. – Matt Oakes, Silver Screen Riot

The dispiriting truth is that  Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm ’s staged pranks can’t compete with our awful reality. – Josh Larsen, LarsenOnFilm

It’s important to acknowledge that in an era of deep fakes, it’s not always clear what Baron Cohen got away with and what has been shaped in the editing room. – Peter Debruge, Variety

What can you tell us about the ending ?

The ending of the film is jaw-dropping. I’m not exaggerating when I say this. My mouth was absolutely agape… It’s a third act you’ve got to see to believe. – Kyle Pinion, ScreenRex

Nothing can prepare you for what they’ve delivered, particularly a riotous third act that genuinely left me in hysterics. – Doug Jamieson, The Jam Report

Watching it, your brain turns into an exclamation point. – Sonia Saraiya, Vanity Fair

The film’s climactic moment is like shooting fish in a barrel. – Adam Graham, Detroit News

Feels in bad taste, even by Borat’s standards… It’s the sequel’s big misstep and feels unnecessary. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

(Photo by )

Is Borat even relevant any more ?

The George W. Bush era needed a Borat, and the Trump years make him painfully redundant. – John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

We don’t need Cohen to show us the underbelly anymore; you only need YouTube or a family dinner nowadays. – Matt Oakes, Silver Screen Riot

Baron Cohen delivers a biting satire that says more about the state of America than practically anything else this year… This is precisely the film we need right now. – Doug Jamieson, The Jam Report

It does go far enough to try and prove that even those we see as “too far gone” can have a change of mind and heart… We really should’ve listened to him the first time around. – Charlie Ridgeley, ComicBook.com

Amid all of the insanity of 2020, it’s incredible that  Borat 2  actually got made – and we’re lucky we did because it is the movie we need right now. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

[It’s] exactly what we all need right now. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm  will debut on Amazon Prime on October 26, 2020.

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Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

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Watch Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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Part satire, part shockumentary, Borat gets high-fives almost all-around for being offensive in the funniest possible way. Jagshemash!

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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm | 2020 | R | – 8.5.5

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm SEX/NUDITY 8

Borat subsequent moviefilm violence/gore 5, borat subsequent moviefilm language 5, borat subsequent moviefilm substance use, borat subsequent moviefilm discussion topics, borat subsequent moviefilm message.

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The Apprentice is a riveting if familiar account of Donald Trump's years spent at Roy Cohn's knee

Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong bring nuance and specificity to the Trump-Cohn relationship.

Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine , The Hollywood Reporter , and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight , is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen.

As Dr. Frankenstein once learned, the problem with creating a monster is that eventually, you have to confront the horrors you have wrought.

That's what happened to Roy Cohn ( Jeremy Strong ) after mentoring a young Donald Trump ( Sebastian Stan ), an American parable of greed and betrayal brought to life with a soap-operatic glee in The Apprentice , which is making its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of its pre-election Oct. 11 release date.

The movie has generated plenty of press already, garnering cease-and-desist letters and attempts to block its release from the Trump campaign. But despite that furor, The Apprentice doesn't tell us anything we don't already know (considering the sheer volume of press that Trump has received in the last 10 years).

The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, chronicles the rise of Donald Trump as a real estate mogul and his descent into greed, egomania, and moral bankruptcy throughout the 1970s and '80s. As a young man desperate to impress his father, Fred (Martin Donovan), Trump finds an unexpected ally in notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, infamous for sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair at the height of the Red Scare.

Profile Pictures

Cohn takes Trump under his corrupted wing, teaching him the three rules by which he lives: 1) Attack, attack, attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; and 3) No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. It's a sickeningly familiar playbook to anyone who's watched the news in the past decade.

As a wheeler and dealer, Cohn covets his power and champions the notion that truth is malleable, embracing his status as an indicted and embattled legal figure. But he also has a secret: He's gay, sleeping with Russell Eldridge (Ben Sullivan) and a host of other men who flit in and out of his circle. But as is so often the case, the student eventually exceeds the master as Trump elevates Cohn's propensity for lies and exploitation of legal gray areas to an art (of the deal).

The film doesn't offer much insight into Trump beyond what's already out there, hitting the bullet points of his withholding father, early forays into real estate, hyperbolic business dealings accompanied by massive debts, and a latent misogyny that eventually extends to even to his wife, Ivana ( Maria Bakalova ). Perhaps that's because there is nothing left to plumb. By this point, Trump and every political pundit with air time has made it abundantly clear who he is and how he got that way. The most disturbing aspect of The Apprentice is how familiar this all is by now and how numb we are to its depravity.

What The Apprentice does have to offer is a masterful slate of performances that far exceed the usual mimicry of many buzzy Hollywood biopics. Stan avoids any of the over-the-top late-night parodies of Donald Trump, instead gradually evolving into the more recognizable bloviating, tanned, grotesque figure. At first, he has the marker of only a few of Trump's tics — the slight pucker of his lips, the halting, hyperbolic repetitive speech patterns.

But as Donny's ego grows, so does his waistline, his bald spot, and his exaggerated way of talking, his lips puckering in direct correlation to his spiraling egomania. Stan shows us that devolution with a careful precision, forgoing imitation for a true embodiment. It's hard to believe that anyone as attractive as Stan could so believably transform into a man so wretched, and yet, he does so with a subtlety that Trump scarcely deserves.

James Devaney/GC;Profile Pictures

Still, while Stan's transformation is remarkable, the movie's MVP is Strong as Roy Cohn. Strong, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of eldest boy Kendall Roy on Succession , has a gift for humanizing the most corrupt and despicable among us. Without question, Roy Cohn was one of the most repugnant historical figures of the 20th Century, and yet, somehow Strong makes us feel empathy for the man (and really, Mr. Strong, I say this with deep affection: F--- you for that). Strong is able to reach beyond the moral rot and corruption of a person to find whatever fragile piece of a soul his characters may possess.

Strong also delivers a riveting arc, beginning as an overly tanned power player and wasting away into a man felled by his own hubris and the AIDS epidemic. As Trump slowly excises Cohn from his life, you can practically hear Strong mutter, "Et tu, Brute?" as he sizes up the monster he has created.

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Maria Bakalova, Oscar-nominated for her work in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , also delivers top-tier work as Trump's first wife, Ivana. She goes toe-to-toe with her husband, initially winning him over with her model body and her business aspirations (a fact that later turns him against her). Bakalova captures Ivana's conflicted love for Donald and the trappings of his lifestyle while emphasizing that Ivana at least still had some degree of a moral compass. And it's impossible not to relish the strange synchronicity of Bakalova's portrayal of Ivana and the fact that the actress first rose to prominence for her onscreen encounter with former Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Abbasi shoots everything with a tacky, cheap veneer, though it is sometimes difficult to tell if this is intentional or a factor of the independent production's small budget. Regardless, it mostly works. And Martin Dirkov, David Holmes, and Brian Irvine enhance it all with a score that echoes the surging melodies of Succession, a musical motif that now automatically signifies greed and its deleterious consequences.

Near the film's conclusion, Abbasi concocts a cross-cutting sequence that hammers home the thesis of all this camp grotesquerie. As Roy Cohn is laid to rest by a children's choir singing, "My Country Tis of Thee," Donald Trump undergoes liposuction and surgery to remove his bald spot. It distills the cognitive dissonance of Trump and Cohn's success and celebrity, juxtaposing the bloody, ugly, entirely false pursuit of an appealing veneer with the twisted patriotism these two men contend to espouse. Only in America could men like Donald Trump and Roy Cohn exist — their greed, their lust for power, their belief in themselves and their self-importance a product of the myths of independence and self-reliance they were fed since birth. And in that way, The Apprentice encapsulates the American Dream, revealing all the ways in which it can be subverted into a nightmare. Grade: B+

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Borat (2006) movie review.

When I sat down to watch Borat I had some fears about the hype surrounding it. It was nominated for an Oscar for Christ’s sake. Once again the hype didn’t end up affecting me, Borat was freaking hilarious!

Sacha Baron Cohen must be some kind of genius. Not only was Borat nominated for an Oscar, but it made over $100 million at the box office and has people raving about it. And there’s a good reason why. Borat is not only gut busting funny but original. Refusing to go the way of recent comedies, Borat does its own warped and funny thing for its “just right” 84 minutes. It never outdoes its welcome and keeps the laughs coming, minute by minute. Right done to its one liners (“If I pay you extra will you put in pussy magnet?”) to its Hilarious yet awkward moments (all about the hotel fight scene-“Eat my Asshole!”-LOL) I also laughed my arse off at Borat’s fear of Jews. I also really grooved to the film’s story. Borat comes to America to learn about our culture and ends up going on a mission to find his new bride, Pamela Anderson. Not much to the story but I dug it. The movie ended up becoming a road trip movie, which I love. I also loved Borat’s transportation, an old ice cream truck and his choice of protection against the Jews, a grizzly bear! This maybe not my favorite comedy of 2006, but it was still pretty damn good. This is perfect to watch while playing some fun sports betting games via https://www.gbcity-w.com/ . 

Sacha Baron Cohen is Borat. This is his character and no one can play it better then him. He made me laugh my arse off. Ken Davitian (Azamat) also had me laughing as Borat’s friend. Pamela Anderson plays herself and looks smoking hot doing it.

Larry Charles’ directing fits the film like a glove. Its nothing overly special but the film doesn’t need stylish directing. Good Show!

I don’t remember a music score but the Kazakhstan music was catchy and damn funny.

For those with a fear of male nudity, you’ll want to avoid certain scenes in Borat. The hotel scene, although awkward to look at, was pretty damn funny. But please for Borat 2, add some female nudity.

In the end, Borat was a rip roaring and hilarious fun time. I can see why so many people love it. I recommend renting it first and than buying. Highly recommended.

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I'll Be Right There Review: Edie Falco Shines in Your Typical Messy-Family Dramedy

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How do you picture yourself saying "I'll be right there"? Maybe it's super casual because, well, most things can wait. Or perhaps it's the polar opposite, and you're saying it with utter turmoil because the person to whom you're speaking is under the impression that, no, it cannot wait. The latter is typically the case for aging mom and soon-to-be grandma Wanda, played to reliable perfection by Emmy winner Edie Falco ( Avatar: The Way of Water ).

Directed by Brendan Walsh (reteaming with Falco after a handful of Nurse Jackie episodes they did together) and written by Jim Beggarly, I'll Be Right There benefits from the same sort of razor-sharp wit Falco brought to her Sopranos role of Carmela, plus a handful of other elements such as the stellar cast alongside Falco for her wryly funny new indie feature.

A Fish (Out of Water) Named Wanda

I'll Be Right There

• Falco and her love interests are expectedly wonderful
• Grounded family dynamics shine through
• Things turn a bit predictable by the end
• Messy-family punchlines we've seen before

There's a deadpan-hilarious but quietly unnerving line in the classic holiday flick A Christmas Story (1983), where narrator Ralphie claims, as we watch the overworked matriarch serve dinner: "My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in 15 years." One could argue similar statistics can be attributed to super-mom Wanda in I'll Be Right There . Her grown-up kids Sarah ( Mrs. America star Kayli Carter) and Mark ( Ozark star Charlie Tahan) live close by, which allows Wanda to answer their beckoning calls at virtually any time of day . The kicker? For one, Charlie is a recovering drug-addict wildcard who may just wake up one day with that sudden urge to join the Army; and the neurotic Sarah, meanwhile, is increasingly pregnant and keeping her frenetic fiancé Eugene ( Painkiller star Jack Mulhern) on edge 24/7.

And why stop the fun there? Sarah wants an expensive wedding before she welcomes her baby, a daunting event that Wanda's eye-roll of ex-husband, Henry ( Bradley Whitford, doing peak Whitford ), is now claiming he doesn't have the dough to co-fund with her. What a guy. Speaking of "guys," Wanda has a little fling with a newfound love interest, in the more platonic form of bar owner Marshall (Michael Rapaport, doing vintage Rapaport), who also happens to employ the bookkeeping Wanda.

Since platonic doesn't exactly satisfy a certain craving, as they say, that's where kinky sexual partner Sophie (Sepideh Moafi) enters the picture. Yes, Wanda is at that stage where she’s a bit more spontaneous and experimental, and that includes perhaps even swinging both ways when it comes to the bedroom. I'll Be Right There , as it were, certainly benefits from keeping us on our toes on the storyline front with sexy little plot developments like these .

Edie Falco Thought Avatar: The Way of Water Was a Box Office Flop That Came Out Years Ago

"It happens, ya know?" the actress, who plays General Frances Ardmore in the Avatar sequel, said.

'What Is It You Want, Wanda?'

Opposite the beautiful but middle-aged Wanda, friend-with-benefits Sophie is younger and arguably full of more energy than the overworked grandma-to-be, but that doesn’t stop Sophie from showering Wanda with compliments about her tricks on the intimacy front. Go, Wanda! The lopsided age dynamic does, however, prevent Sophie from bringing Wanda into her social circles and all that, which is rightfully a major turn-off for Wanda .

Then, lo and behold, there happens to be a dashing neighbor (Michael Beach) who, through a twist of fate, makes his presence known to her. Albert is the same age as Wanda and has just re-entered her troubled life decades later — as it turns out, the two of them once attended high school together. "This is not a date" is Wanda's comedic go-to line whenever he turns on the charm and innocently proposes they meet up for a casual dinner.

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But despite how this all reads on paper, Wanda seems to manage the scattered lover's quarrels okay, especially in the face of more grave matters, aka life-threatening disease. It's not Wanda, however, but her own mom Grace (the reliable scene-stealer Jeannie Berlin) who is diagnosed with leukemia — but the fact that all these issues feel so close to and directly affecting Wanda's well-being is telling enough that this family woman is utterly selfless 24 hours a day, 8 days a week (yes, she seems to be working overtime more often than not).

I'll Be Right There may feel like a messy family tale we've seen before, but the existential crisis Wanda endures is utterly relatable , even if you're not a perpetually stressed single mom of two adults (who act a bit like children). Added to that, there are some hard-hitting zingers dished by Wanda's increasingly agitated lovers, such as the neglected Marshall — who finally yells out at her at one point, "It'd be better if I were one of your kids." In other words, they're the ones who get all the love from Wanda, even if they (allegedly) take her motherly selflessness for granted. Thank goodness it's Brooklyn native Falco who's there to breathe a fiery, contemplative life into Wanda to balance out the drama and stand her ground , ultimately navigating what it is she truly wants in this life.

From Brainstorm Media, I'll Be Right There will be released in theaters on Friday, September 6th.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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See and hear Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in clip from upcoming movie

The early days of Donald Trump's rise to prominence as a real estate mogul in New York City are the subject of a new film that has prompted promises of a lawsuit from the former president's campaign.

"The Apprentice" premiered on May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival in France, earning an ovation from the crowd — and an angry response from Trump.

The film stars Sebastian Stan as a young Trump, and "Succession" star Jeremy Strong as his mentor, notorious New York City attorney and fixer Roy Cohn, who is shown guiding Trump early in his career and instilling much of the mentality that defines Trump today.

Now, people are getting their first look at Stan's Trump impression . In the one-minute clip, Stan's Trump takes an interview over the phone with a reporter.

"I intend to acquire the Commodore, and I’m planning on making it the best and the finest building in the city, maybe the country — in the world … it’s going to be the finest building in the world," he says. When asked where he gets "the drive" for his ambitious project, the character replies: "I got flair and I'm smart, so I think that's going to make me successful. But I also want to stay humble."

In the background, Cohn (played by Strong) makes hand gestures coaching the fictional Trump on what to say.

The release comes amid debate over the film, which reportedly features a rape scene. Here's what to know about the controversy.

What is 'The Apprentice' about?

Director Ali Abbasi depicts Trump as a young playboy in the mid-1980s in New York City, when he worked for his father's real estate firm and sought to make connections to the city's powerful figures.

The central relationship in the movie is between Trump and the late Cohn, a former attorney and prosecutor who first rose to prominence as the chief counsel in Sen. Joseph McCarthy's notorious investigations of suspected communists in the 1950s.

Cohn mentors an impressionable young Trump about how to navigate the cutthroat world of New York City real estate, politics and business, according to a review of the film in Variety .

He comes into Trump's orbit after being hired as attorney by the Trump family when the U.S. Justice Department files a lawsuit against the Trump Organization. The company was accused of discrimination practices against prospective Black renters in its apartment buildings.

The film then shows Trump becoming acquainted with other powerful figures in the city and eventually meeting his first wife, Ivana, according to the Variety review. The crumbling of their marriage and accusations of philandering by Trump are depicted, along with Trump distancing himself from his mentor Cohn, a gay man who died in 1986 from complications from AIDS.

The movie was written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, who profiled Trump in various magazines and publications over the years. It received an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes, according to The Hollywood Reporter .

Variety called the film "sharp and scathing," while The Hollywood Reporter described it as "a chilling account" and said Strong and Stan are "superb."

There is no date for when it will be released in the U.S. It's for sale in Cannes and has not secured a deal with a distributor yet.

Which scene is causing controversy?

The movie reportedly includes a striking scene that depicts Trump raping his then-wife, Ivana, who is played by "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm" actor Maria Bakalova.

The scene drew "audible gasps" from the crowd at Cannes, according to The Hollywood Reporter .

TODAY.com has not seen the film and does not have first-hand details about the scene. The movie opens with a disclaimer that some events are fictionalized and names have been changed, according to Variety, The Guardian and others.

Ivana Trump said in a divorce deposition in 1990 that Donald raped her in 1989. She claimed her husband had lashed out at her after going to her plastic surgeon for painful scalp surgery.

“He raped me,” she allegedly told her close friends, according to the 1993 book that first reported the deposition, “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump," by Harry Hurt III, according to NBC News .

Trump denied the allegation. Ivana Trump later disavowed that she was raped.

“During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me. [O]n one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage," she said in a statement published in Hurt’s book.

"As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

Ivana died at 73 in 2022.

What is Trump’s response to 'The Apprentice' movie?

The former president has promised legal action against the filmmakers.

"We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to NBC News on May 21.

"This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked. As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.

"This 'film' is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”

Abbasi, the director, appeared unfazed after being informed of the Trump campaign's comments while in Cannes.

"Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” he told reporters, according to The Associated Press .

The director then offered to screen the movie privately for Trump.

“I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know?

"And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”

Scott Stump is a trending reporter and the writer of the daily newsletter This is TODAY (which you should subscribe to here! ) that brings the day's news, health tips, parenting stories, recipes and a daily delight right to your inbox. He has been a regular contributor for TODAY.com since 2011, producing features and news for pop culture, parents, politics, health, style, food and pretty much everything else. 

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Report this review, hilarious movie contains crude and potentially offensive humour..

This title has:

• Too much sex
• Too much swearing

Hilarious, extremely offensive comedy mocks current events

Great banter.....

• Great messages

Good movie, but definitely not for children!

Great boundary-pushing comedy that has sex and language only for adults..

• Too much consumerism

Vile, Vulgar and Not Funny

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• Cast & crew

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails reunite against a powerful new adversary, Shadow, a mysterious villain with powers unlike anything they have faced before. With their abilities outmatched, Team So... Read all Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails reunite against a powerful new adversary, Shadow, a mysterious villain with powers unlike anything they have faced before. With their abilities outmatched, Team Sonic must seek out an unlikely alliance. Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails reunite against a powerful new adversary, Shadow, a mysterious villain with powers unlike anything they have faced before. With their abilities outmatched, Team Sonic must seek out an unlikely alliance.

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Top cast 28

• Maddie Wachowski

• Commander Walters

• Tom Wachowski

• Dr. Robotnik …

• Agent Stone

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Did you know

• Trivia The film makers of the prior movies have mentioned playing both Sonic Adventure 2 (2001) and the Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) solo game for inspiration. The film is also inspired by narrative elements from the Saturday morning animated television series Sonic the Hedgehog (1993) .
• Goofs In the Knuckles TV series, Sonic said, "Robotnik's gone, and there's no new battle to fight." But in this movie, he told Tails and Knuckles that they have to ask Dr. Robotnik to help them defeat Shadow The Hedgehog. Because of this, it's unknown how they found out that he was still alive.

Commander Walters : [about Shadow] Shadow's story began a lot like yours, Sonic. But where you found family and friends, Shadow found only pain. and loss.

• Connections Follows Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
• When will Sonic the Hedgehog 3 be released? Powered by Alexa
• December 20, 2024 (United States)
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‘I’m Still Here’ Review: Walter Salles’ Profoundly Moving Sense-Memory Portrait of a Family — and a Nation — Ruptured

The heartbreaking story of Rubens Paiva's 1970 disappearance at the hands of the Brazilian military dictatorship is recounted, with beauty and dignity, through the eyes of the wife and children who lived through it.

By Jessica Kiang

Jessica Kiang

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Walter Salles ‘ deeply poignant “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian director’s return to his homeland and to the filmmaking form that yielded his Oscar-nominated “Central Station,” begins where maybe every movie set in Rio de Janeiro should: at the beach. A stray dog disturbs a game of volleyball. Girls dab Coca-cola onto their skin as tanning lotion. Little kids play football and flirty teens trade gossip about pop stars and boys they like. In the sparkling water, Eunice Paiva (a stunning turn from Salles regular Fernanda Torres) floats on her back, squinting against the sun. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. But there is a helicopter.

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Perhaps if the focus was solely on the loss of Rubens — a beloved father and husband who was moved by his conscience to help the opponents of the regime in secret — the hue of nostalgia that drenches the movie would become maudlin. But Salles’ real focus (and that of the book by Rubens’ son Marcelo on which the film is based) is resilience, especially as demonstrated by Eunice, who is entirely embodied in Torres’ superb performance. The kind of woman who is effortlessly elegant in every outfit, and whose soufflés never stick to the pan, after her husband’s abduction and her own terrifying ordeal, Eunice’s resourcefulness in raising her children and starting anew despite her enormous grief and the cruel denial of her husband’s fate by the authorities, become the backbone of a story of survivorship and quiet courage.

Classical in form but radical in empathy, “I’m Still Here” arguably does not need the follow-up sections — one set in 1996 and the other in 2014 — that somewhat alter the emotional rhythm. But on the other hand, these characters are so vivid that we don’t want to leave them either, and Eunice’s campaign for the official recognition of her husband’s forced disappearance was a process that took many years to bear fruit. Not only that, but the 2014 epilogue allows us a glimpse of Salles’ “Central Station” star and Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, in a brief role as the older Eunice.

And perhaps most crucially, having the film end with Eunice’s now even more extended clan gathered once again in an airy garden for a smiling family photograph, turns it into a cautionary tale, addressed to those forces in Brazil and beyond, who would seek a return to repression and rule by fear. The national spirit you seek to subdue will outlast you. The people you try to oppress will live to see you reviled and rejected by history, while those who resist will have songs and stories written about them. They will inspire music and art in celebration of their lives and will have movies as heartsore and beautiful as “I’m Still Here” made in their honor.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Competition), Sept. 1, 2024. Running time: 137 MIN. (Original title: "Ainda estou aqui")

• Production: (Brazil-France) A VideoFilmes, RT Features, MACT Productions production in co-production with Arte France Cinéma, Conspiração, Globoplay. (World Sales: Goodfellas, Paris.) Producers: Maria Carlota Bruno,  Rodrigo Teixeira, Martine de Clermont-Tonnerre. Executive Producers: Guilherme Terra, Thierry de Clermont-Tonnerre, Lourenço Sant’anna, Renata Brandão, Juliana Capelini, David Taghioff, Masha Magonova.
• Crew: Director: Walter Salles. Screenplay: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega, based on the book ‘Ainda Estou Aqui’ by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. Camera: Adrian Teijido. Editor: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Warren Ellis.
• With: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kozovski, Bárbara Luz, Cora Mora, Guilherme Silveira, Maria Manoella, Marjorie Estiano, Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, Olivia Torres, Antonio Saboia, Fernanda Montenegro. (Portuguese dialogue)

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