Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice touches down at Cannes, and David Cronenberg gets personal with The Shrouds.
Controversy has swept into Cannes, riding on the back of a new Donald Trump biopic (but is the movie any good?). Plus: David Cronenberg returns and there are acquisitions aplenty.
Any movie about the life of Donald Trump was going to stir up controversy. But “The Apprentice,” from Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi (whose last film, the brutal “Holy Spider,” competed for the Palme d’Or in 2022) and starring Sebastian Stan as the former (and possible future) president, is enraging pretty much everybody.
Before the film even screened, one of the film’s backers, billionaire Dan Snyder, issued cease-and-desist letters against the film, which he had partially funded believing that it would be a warm portrait of the former commander-in-chief. (Snyder is a hardcore conservative who donated more than $1 million to Trump and his inaugural committee in 2016.) Upon learning that the film is unflattering, and features a much-talked-about sequence where Trump rapes his former wife Ivana (played by “Borat 2” breakout Maria Bakalova), Snyder attempted to, at first, exert creative control and, now, is attempting to block the film from getting a release.
Trump himself also threatened legal action over the film on Monday, with his campaign’s chief spokesman Steven Cheung telling TheWrap they will “be filing a lawsuit.” (Trump is currently on trial in New York City for his Stormy Daniels hush money fraud conviction.)
“The Apprentice,” at the very least, screened at Cannes — and the response has been decidedly muted. Named after Trump’s reality show, follows the mogul in his early days as he is mentored by Roy Cohn (played by “Succession” Emmy winner Jeremy Strong). IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he was “mostly bored” by this obvious “I’ve created a monster” drama, and awarded it a C in his review. New York Magazine critic Bilge Ebiri described the movie as “a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity.”
Ebiri continued: “At his premiere, Abbasi talked about tackling the rising tide of fascism head-on, but I’m not sure this choppy dress-up picture does that. And at some point we might wonder why we’re spending two hours watching a movie that, as it goes on, starts to feel more and more like a fancy, vaguely arty ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch that refuses to end.” (Rafa Sales Ross, writing for The Playlist, liked it more, saying that it “works” and giving it a B+.
