This very well-made movie is still constructed that are wholly and completely gossamer.

| Nov 4, 2024

It’s surprising and even a little disappointing that The Apprentice doesn’t go all in on the grotesque and extreme aspects of the Trumpian evolution. But it does show a side of the former US president that, you suspect, he would prefer not to be seen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2024

The film is a well-paced and often entertaining story of how Trump evolved from an insecure blustery young man into a still insecure and blustery older one, but someone with a greater grasp of how to manipulate others and egomaniacally impose himself.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 25, 2024

The standout is Jeremy Strong who is utterly magnetic as Roy Cohn. It's a vampiric performance.

| Oct 22, 2024

The Apprentice would have been a better movie had it featured such star power at its center—but better still would have been a movie that offered more insight into the nature of that power, whether in tabloids, in politics, or in movies themselves.

| Oct 21, 2024

This is a solid film that's worth watching in the lead-up to the presidential election. The performances — of Stan, Strong and Bakalova — are first rate.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 21, 2024

The Apprentice would have benefited from a script crafted with more tension and suspense, but the performances are terrific.

| Oct 18, 2024

The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait... a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 17, 2024

It’s an origin story, if you like, and I was gripped throughout. It’s brilliantly acted and conceived, and it takes its subject seriously. It’s not like an extended Saturday Night Live routine.

| Oct 17, 2024

The Apprentice is sharpest when tracing Maga back to Cohn in all his pungent strangeness. Much else is fuzzy at the edges.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 17, 2024

Glossy, grotesque, and intriguing even as you hate yourself for getting sucked into it, this isn’t an awful film. It just shouldn’t exist.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 16, 2024

A smart, tragic take on just how dark the American Dream can be, with award-worthy work from Stan and Strong.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 15, 2024

You may think that you know enough already, and never want to watch a film about Trump. The Apprentice, though, deserves to be seen. It’s genuinely clarifying.

| Oct 14, 2024

The Apprentice shows you Trump as a performance, a little unreal, a little eerie, without ever feeling as though it’s losing points to Trump the man.

| Oct 14, 2024

The Apprentice is an essential piece of cinema, both thought-provoking and timely. It doesn’t seek to offer easy answers or redemption, and with sharp performances and a narrative that refuses to flinch, the film leaves a lasting impact.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 14, 2024

The origins of the Donald Trump playbook... are probed in "The Apprentice," director Ali Abbasi's provocative if not explosive biographical drama which doesn't take on the former (and future?) president so much as it sets out to examine him.

| Original Score: B | Oct 13, 2024

The Apprentice delivers an entertaining portrait of a three-dimensional human being who so emulates his mentor that he finally acquires all of his most disturbing traits. It’s a smart, but not smart-alecky, dramatization of his evolution.

| Oct 13, 2024

Even though it never felt like I was learning anything new about the blossoming megalomaniac (and future US president), I could not pull my eyes away from the screen. Watching this man (monster?) come into his own was upsettingly captivating.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 13, 2024

Donald Trump has been such inescapable figure in American culture that the question is what could a serious movie about him actually have to say at this point? As it turns out, the answer is somewhere in between “a lot” and “nothing new.”

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 12, 2024

Sebastian Stan expertly depicts Trump's rise from raw hustler to larger-than-life tycoon.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 12, 2024