The Apprentice depicts the ex-president’s come up, a gamble that’s led to legal threats and Hollywood discourse

In 1973, Donald Trump was a hungry, awkward real estate heir from Queens looking for respect in New York. Not particularly smart, not particularly charming and with no solid plan to combat a federal lawsuit over the family company’s discrimination against Black tenants, the young Trump was fumbling toward his dream of opening a lavish hotel near Grand Central. That is, until he met Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pugilistic prosecutor turned Richard Nixon confidant and political fixer, at a swanky New York club.

That’s the opening scene of The Apprentice, a new film out this month following a beleaguered journey to theaters. Written by Vanity Fair’s longtime Trump chronicler Gabriel Sherman and directed by the Iranian Danish film-maker Ali Abbasi, the film depicts the young Trump’s ascent in New York society in the 1970s and 80s via Cohn’s shameless tactics, as the lawyer’s health weakened due to HIV/Aids. The question dogging the film, starring a de-handsomed Sebastian Stan as Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, has been: does anyone want to watch a Trump movie? And after the film fizzled into a long period of distribution uncertainty following some positive reviews at the Cannes film festival in May – would anyone be able to watch it?

New York film festival: an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s bestselling 2018 novel about a woman dealing with her friend’s suicide is tender and well-acted, if a little messy

It takes a certain type of person to have a dog in New York City, let alone a 180lb, questionably behaved one. Iris, played with a natural grace by Naomi Watts in The Friend, is not that type of person. She is a mostly solitary writer in a small – at least, to the eyes of her more accomplished peers – apartment in the West Village, whose schedule is at the whims of her teaching work and sputtering attempts at a novel. She has settled into an independent rhythm of middle-aged singledom in the city. Also, she prefers cats. Nevertheless, she finds herself caring for Apollo, her late best friend Walter’s (Bill Murray) beloved great dane, after his suicide.

The Friend, a slight and tender-hearted adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s bestselling 2018 novel, opens with the scene of an abandoned Apollo’s fateful meeting with Walter in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It’s love at first sight, a story he evidently relishes at a dinner party that suggests a rich (in all the ways) life of books, hearty wine and writerly community. The two-hour film, written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, summarily jumps to the present, where Iris finds herself as a reluctant node within a thorny network of women grieving Walter’s death – one current wife (Noma Dumezweni) and two former (Constance Wu and Carla Gugino), as well as a recently un-estranged adult daughter named Val (Sarah Pidgeon), with whom Iris is compiling a book of Walter’s correspondence.

The Friend is screening at the New York film festival and will be released at a later date

The TV patriarch, who also played the older Kunta Kinte on the mini-series Roots, died on 21 August, according to a statement from his son

John Amos, who starred as the stoic father on Good Times and played the older Kunta Kinte on Alex Haley’s seminal mini-series Roots, has died at the age of 84.

His son, Kelly Christopher Amos, announced that Amos died on 21 August of natural causes in Los Angeles.

Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York

The Oscar-winning actor makes a smooth transfer to Broadway but Ayad Akhtar’s play is a mixed bag of insight and exhaustion

The writer Jacob McNeal is, among other things, a bestselling and influential novelist, an esteemed winner of the Nobel prize for literature, a writer with style consistent and public enough to serve as a prompt for ChatGPT. From another view: a narcissistic cad, a terrible father, a lonely drunk. People argue whether he’s a genius, a fraud, an iconoclast. After nearly two hours with him, it’s not clear which. Though mesmerizingly brought to life by Robert Downey Jr in Ayad Akhtar’s muddled and occasionally poignant new play of the same name, McNeal remains more reflection than character – a projection of success, an outlet for anxieties over artificial intelligence, a cipher to destabilize one’s view of reality.

All of these angles offer fertile material for a play of ideas, and to Akhtar’s credit, McNeal is not only a rare original Broadway play but an ambitious one, given starry billing and splashy, tech-forward staging at Lincoln Center. It’s also all over the place, a play of strong performances – Downey, in his Broadway debut, chief among them – that chafe against vague, inchoate ideas about a vaguely ghoulish technology.

The 90-year-old Four Seasons singer makes statement after fan concern following viral videos of recent performances

Frankie Valli is speaking out in defense of his health, after videos of the 90-year-old singer appearing frail and disoriented on stage went viral on social media platforms such as TikTok.

The videos sparked concern among fans that the Four Seasons frontman was being forced to perform against his will, with some accusing his team of elder abuse.

New York film festival: a Palestinian-Israeli collective have documented violence and displacement in a damning new film that offers a stark insider’s look at the conflict

It’s difficult to review No Other Land, a documentary by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activist film-makers on the destruction of villages in the West Bank, on a formal level. The usual rubric for evaluating non-fiction cinema does not really extend to films whose existence was actively challenged throughout filming, whose makers’ equipment and livelihood were constantly at risk. A good portion of the film, which was selected for this year’s New York film festival and won best documentary at the Berlin film festival (to politicized charges of antisemitism and death threats against its makers), is composed of amateur video footage by Basel Adra, who began filming the Israeli occupation of his village in Masafer Yatta at the age of 15, in the name of evidence.

That evidence put forth by the directors – Adra, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, Palestinian film-maker and farmer Haman Ballal and Israeli cinematographer and editor Rachel Szor – is straightforward, un-sensationalized and completely infuriating. There is nothing to say that has not already been said on the case for Palestinian sovereignty, the war crimes of the Israeli government and the moral clarity of those who call for an end to violence and occupation. No Other Land, should it make it to theaters – the film is, perhaps unsurprisingly, still seeking distribution in the US – ensures that people cannot deny it; that there exists a model of coexistence and mutual safety between Palestinians and Israelis; and that there is no justification for the campaign of wanton destruction and despair in the West Bank, just as in Gaza and now Lebanon.