| Briarcliff Entertainment | Release Date: October 11, 2024 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
36
Mixed:
16
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Taken strictly as drama, the film is tartly written and superbly acted, at least until it takes that polemical turn in its final stages. I’ve seen and heard enough about Trump to actively, if ineffectively, avoid content relating to him, but most of The Apprentice held me in thrall.
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Abbasi isn’t a subtle filmmaker, and his need to provoke sometimes undermines his points; his previous movie, the serial-killer thriller Holy Spider (2022), was a commentary on social misogyny that inadvertently courted the very thing it was trying to criticize. Here, the blunt force works in his film’s favor.
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Some will argue that Stan’s performance in the central role is a touch too likeable, but the actor does an excellent job, going beyond impersonation to capture the essence of the man. In a character study of a public figure both widely parodied and unwittingly self-parodying, Stan gives us a more nuanced take on what makes him tick.
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The Apprentice could have delved into the Trump persona or explored how it calcified. But by trying to avoid how Trump’s past reflects his current approach to politics—his zero-sum relationship to power, his pettiness and egotism—while simultaneously winking at viewers’ knowledge of him, the film lands itself in a trap.
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The IndependentOct 18, 2024
What we have here is something like a supervillain origin story, with Cohn spelling out almost every negative trait that now defines the former president. That makes for momentum, but the approach – supposing a man is made by other men alone – is also inherently trivial and reductive.
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For its first half, “The Apprentice” is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting. Yet I have an issue with the movie, and it all pivots around the mystery of Trump. I don’t think “The Apprentice” ever penetrates it.
RogerEbert.comSep 25, 2024
Is this a satire of the American Dream? A horror movie about how it became a nightmare? Or a comedy about a buffoon who basically stumbled into the men’s room on the right day? It seems unwilling to really answer these questions, content to substitute easy shots for difficult conversations about capitalism, politics, family, and marriage.
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The GuardianMay 20, 2024
Director Ali Abbasi has given us fascinating monsters in the past with Holy Spider and Border but the monstrosity here is almost sentimental, a cartoon Xeroxed from many other satirical Trump takes and knowing prophetic echoes of his political future. It’s basically a far less original picture.
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By halfway, Trump gets more flagrantly cruel, delusional, thin- skinned and aggressive. It’s the kind of charismatic antihero’s journey that might fly in a Scorsese film – arguably the ultimate Trump film is The Wolf of Wall Street – but Abassi and Sherman’s take on the material is largely dutiful.
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