- Ciara Moloney
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- I wrote about the best movie of 2024
I wrote about the best movie of 2024
It's The Apprentice. Duh.

I wrote about The Apprentice for Current Affairs. It’s a great film that I love very much. A preview:
You probably didn’t see The Apprentice. No, not the Donald Trump reality show—you definitely caught an episode or two of that on NBC over its decade-plus run. But my compulsion to clarify that just underscores—despite two (admittedly long-shot) Oscar nominations, both for acting—that you probably did not see the 2024 film The Apprentice. It stars Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump, the titular apprentice, during his rise in the 1970s and ’80s—from rebuilding the Commodore Hotel to The Art of the Deal—under the mentorship of infamous lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). It’s easy to attribute the film’s financial failure to psychological generalizations about audiences. In Jacobin, Eileen Jones “had to wonder who the audience was supposed to be for this film,” since “Trump supporters will never see it” and “the anti-Trump segment of the population, perhaps drawn to this highly unflattering portrayal, might not be able to bear a solid block of time spent watching the bane of their existences rise to personal wealth, power, and influence in 1980s New York City.”
There’s likely some truth to this. When I first heard about The Apprentice, my gut instinct was a Trump-fatigued eye roll. But there was a lot more at play as to why the film wasn’t widely seen. Despite distribution rights for most territories being purchased in short order, it took a long time to find a U.S. distributor, with Deadline reporting that it soon “became clear that major studios would steer clear” as “a return to the White House by Trump could create problems for the conglomerate” that distributed it. (Problems like the U.S. government actually enforcing antitrust laws, for instance.) Trump’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist to the filmmakers and threatened to sue. When the film did find a distributor in the form of Briarcliff Entertainment, the release was small, and the marketing budget was minimal: The Apprentice had zero TV spots. Apart from those award nominations, the industry has mostly sought to shut the film out of discussion: no other actor would agree to appear on Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series with Sebastian Stan, who stated, “we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them because they were too afraid to talk about this movie.” It’s a case study in the chilling effect of consolidation in the corporate world, cult-of-personality fascism in the political world, and how they work together to censor without having it on the books as censorship. It would be outrageous for any piece of art, but it’s especially galling for a film as vital as this one.
You can read the rest of the article here! Please enjoy.
parting recs
Watch: John Frankenheimer’s 1973 film of The Iceman Cometh.
Listen: California by Joni Mitchell.
Read: I finally read The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman like I was supposed to in undergrad, and turns out, it’s pretty good!
Check out otherwise: Going for a walk outside. Really works!
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