Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A young Donald Trump, eager to make his name as a hungry scion of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn, the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today. Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protégé—someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.
The Apprentice is a provocative character study anchored by Sebastian Stan's transformative performance as a young Trump and Jeremy Strong's magnetic, scene-stealing Roy Cohn. The mentor-protégé dynamic gives the film a compelling dramatic spine, and Ali Abbasi's direction brings an unsettling intimacy to the material. The film earns its strongest marks for acting, with Strong in particular delivering one of the year's most committed performances. The cinematography has a deliberately grainy, period-appropriate texture that suits the 70s/80s setting but doesn't transcend it. The plot is solid but occasionally episodic, struggling to fully dramatize Trump's interior transformation rather than just cataloguing events. Novelty is present — few films have tackled this subject with such unflinching and morally complex framing — but the biopic structure is familiar enough to limit its distinctiveness. The ending is appropriately bleak and resonant without being particularly surprising.