The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Martin Donovan, Maria Bakalova, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall. Screenplay: Gabriel Sherman. Cinematography: Kasper Tuxen. Production design: Aleksandra Marinkovich. Film editing: Olivier Bugge Coutté, Olivia Neergaard-Holm. Music: Martin Dirkov. 

Ali Abbasi's movie The Apprentice doesn't have a third act because we're living it. It just ends, with the future a glint in Donald Trump's eye, and whether it will be a tragedy or a comedy remains to be seen. Trump is played splendidly by a porked-out Sebastian Stan, who deserved the Oscar nomination he received for not making such a familiar character into a collection of mannerisms. Stan's Trump is vicious but vulnerable, easy prey for a reptile like Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong with the sinister greed of his character in Succession turned up to 11. By focusing on the relationship between Trump and Cohn, Gabriel Sherman's screenplay becomes a reversal of fortune story, with Trump rising and Cohn falling when Frankenstein loses control of his Creature. The film is at its best in the first half, portraying the shady real estate dealing in 1970s New York City with the relish shown by Scorsese and Coppola in their gangster sagas. It's less successful at giving us a sense of the family background that bred the narcissism and megalomania of the Trump we know today, with only a few glimpses into his relationship with his father, played by Martin Donovan. Sherman's depiction of Trump's sexual cruelty and vanity, including his alleged liposuction and scalp reduction, is drawn from his marriage to and divorce from Ivana (Maria Bakalova), but these scenes stand out oddly from the story of how he rose to power. There will probably never be a successful biopic that gives us the complete Donald Trump, but The Apprentice is a good rough draft of one.  

Typhoon Club (Shinji Somai, 1985)

Cast: Yuichi Mikami, Youki Kudo, Tomokazu Miura, Yuka Onoshi, Yuriko Fuchizaki, Tomiko Ishii, Shigero Benibayashi, Tomoko Aizawa. Screenplay: Yuji Kato. Cinematography: Akihiro Ito. Production design: Noriyoshi Ikeya. Film editing: Isao Tomita. Music: Shigeaki Saegusa. 

Shinji Somai finds a catalyst and a correlative in the storm that animates Typhoon Club, a portrait of adolescence that takes place half a world away from the one found in John Hughes's The Breakfast Club, which appeared the same year. The teenagers of Somai's film are middle schoolers, younger than the ones in Hughes's, and Typhoon Club has a more serious tone, but both acknowledge the perils of a period through which many of us fail to pass unscathed. No wonder that filmmakers constantly turn to it for inspiration to produce movies that range in tone from amused, like Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993), to brutal, like Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl (2001). In Somai's film, the typhoon is the catalyst for acting out, as a group of young teens are trapped in their school while the storm rages. The consequences range from pranks and making out to rape and suicide. The passage of the storm leaves damage that is both physical and emotional. Typhoon Club deals with so many characters, including some adults, that it's sometimes as noisy and confusing as the storm itself, but Somai maintains steady control throughout.  

Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1978)

Cast: Sabine Haudepin, Philippe Marlaud, Annick Alane, Michel Caron, Christian Bouillette, Bernard Tronczyk, Patrick Lepcynski, Valérie Chassigneux, Jean-François Adam, Agnès Makowiak, Charline Pourré, Patrick Playez, Muriel Lacroix, Frédérique Cerbonnet, Fabienne Neuville, Aline Fayard. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn. Film editing: Sophie Coussin, Martine Giordano, Arlette Langmann. Music: Voyage. 

The baccalauréat, or the bac, is the French rite of passage into adulthood referred to in the title of Maurice Pialat's Passe ton bac d'abord, or Graduate First, a docufictional slice of life centered on the 19-year-olds of the town of Lens in northern France. Pialat employs a mix of professional and non-professional actors to suggest that this emergence from the crucible of secondary school and adolescence is not exactly the joyous event it's celebrated as, especially in a place like Lens, an economically depressed former coal mining town. The choices for post-graduate life boil down to marriage, marginal employment, the dole, or escape, and Pialat's film views all of those options with a melancholy eye. Graduate First is not without its comic moments, especially in its view of the clumsiness of adolescence and the incomprehension of elders, but the attempt to tell too many stories makes for a scattered film.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Guy Ritchie, 2024)

Alan Ritchson and Henry Cavill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Cast: Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Eiza González, Babs Olusanmokun, Cary Elwes, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Henry Golding, Rory Kinnear, Til Schweiger, Freddie Fox, Henry Zaga, Danny Sapani. Screenplay: Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie, based on a book by Damien Lewis. Cinematography: Ed Wild. Production design: Martyn John. Film editing: James Herbert. Music: Christopher Benstead. 

If Henry Cavill isn't cast as the next James Bond it may be because he's already played the role: His character in Guy Ritchie's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is based on the World War II special ops agent who was one of the models for Ian Fleming's character. Fleming himself appears in Ritchie's movie, played by Freddie Fox. Unfortunately, that bit of borrowed glamour is the most interesting thing about the film, which is routine war action stuff, a caricature of the actual Operation Postmaster in 1942. Cavill's Gus March-Phillips heads a team of misfits with nothing to lose in an attempt to destroy a ship supplying the German U-boats that have been prowling the Atlantic. The danger of the mission is reinforced by domestic politics that threatens to undermine the plan, which has the support of Winston Churchill (a miscast Rory Kinnear) but not that of his political rivals. It's a movie loaded with war movie clichés: the sultry spy (Eiza Gonzàlez), the nasty Nazi (Til Schweiger), the marksman who never misses (Alan Ritchson), the last minute need for a Plan B. You've seen it all done better. 

Nomad (Patrick Tam, 1982)

Patricia Ha in Nomad

Cast: Patricia Ha, Kent Tong, Cecilia Yip, Leslie Cheung, Stuart Ong. Screenplay: Chiu Kang-chien, Joyce Chan, Eddie Fong, Kam Ping-hin, John Chan Koong-chun, Patrick Tam. Cinematography: Peter Ngor Chi-Kwan, David Chung, Bill Wong. Production design: William Chang, John Hau. Film editing: Cheung Kwok-kuen. Music: Violet Lam. 

The English title Nomad refers to the yacht owned by the family of Louis (Leslie Cheung), an idle young man who finds himself entangled with a working-class young woman called Tomato (Cecilia Yip), while his cousin, Kathy (Patricia Ha), is toying with the affections of Pong (Kent Tong), who scrapes out a living as a lifeguard and a cab driver. But the Chinese title of Patrick Tam's film, which translates as "Youth on Fire," is more to the point. It starts out as a scattered, sexy movie about the escapades of four Hong Kong twentysomethings with not much more on their minds than what their hormones put there. But then it veers off in another direction with the arrival of Kathy's former boyfriend, Shinsuke (Stuart Ong), a deserter from the Japanese militant organization known as the Red Army. Things do not go well for the hedonistic quartet. The credits list six screenwriters, which is a sign that too many ideas have been tossed into the mix for the viewer to assimilate into a coherent story. But Nomad is undoubtedly provocative on many social, political, and historical levels.  

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Callan Mulvey, Tao Okamoto. Screenplay: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer. Cinematography: Larry Fong. Production design: Patrick Tatopoulos. Film editing: David Brenner. Music: Tom Holkenborg, Hans Zimmer. 

Dark, brutal, noisy, and glum, Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is unleavened by wit. The meeting of the self-made superhero and the benevolent alien was bound to happen eventually, but why did anyone have to take it so seriously? Why couldn't it have been fun, like an encounter of the campy Batman of the old TV series and the naïf Superman of James Gunn's 2025 reboot? Or if not that, at least not something so goddamn apocalyptic. You can see some of its actors, particularly Amy Adams and Holly Hunter, trying to rise above the chaos, but they keep getting sucked down into a plot that seems to go out of its way to make less sense than most comic book movies do. 

Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, 1987)

Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire in Under the Sun of Satan

Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Alain Artur, Yann Dedet, Brigitte Legendre, Jean-Claude Bouriat, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Sylvie Pialat, Maurice Pialat, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. Cinematography: Willy Kurant. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Henri Dutilleux. 

Are the torments that afflict the priest played by Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan mental or spiritual? And is there a difference? That's the conundrum the film leaves us to ponder and the reason the film caused so much uproar when it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a tense, talky film that begins with the young priest, Donnisan, confessing his self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy to his superior, Menou-Segret (Pialat), who is shocked to find that Donnisan wears a hair shirt under his cassock -- he also secretly flagellates himself. Then the film shifts to Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a 16-year-old girl with two lovers. She visits the first, Cadignan (Alain Artur) to tell him that she's pregnant and then, playing with his rifle, shoots him. Then she has sex with the other, a physician named Gallet (Yann Dedet), who has examined Cadignan's body and ruled the death a suicide. He tells her that he won't perform an abortion for her. The stories of Donnisan and Mouchette will intersect eventually, but not before the priest experiences a dark night of the soul in an encounter with the devil. Donnisan is transformed but destroyed by this meeting. The denouement, in which Donnisan seems to perform a miracle, has caused the film to be likened to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955), but Pialat's work is messier than Dreyer's.   

Straight to Hell (Alex Cox, 1987)

Courtney Love in Straight to Hell

Cast: Dick Rude, Sy Richardson, Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Sara Sugarman, Biff Yeager, Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Jim Jarmusch, Grace Jones, Zander Schloss. Screenplay: Dick Rude, Alex Cox. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: David Martin. Music: The Pogues, Dan Wool. 

About 40 years ago, a group of Very Cool People found themselves with time on their hands, so they gathered some of their Very Cool Friends and went to the place in Spain where a lot of spaghetti Westerns were made and made one of their own. The story of Alex Cox's Straight to Hell is negligible because nobody took it seriously: Four bank robbers stash the loot in the desert and hole up in a ghost town that suddenly comes alive with a variety of residents, and then everybody pretty much kills everybody else. It's scarcely even a parody of the spaghetti Western. Nobody much liked it at the time. Roger Ebert called it "an indulgent mess" and it bombed at the box office. But it survived as a cult film, and in 2010 it got a "director's cut" version. It's still an indulgent mess, but a few comic moments survive the mayhem, and there is occasionally some funny dialogue: "A gun is like a tool. Ain't no better or no worse than the man that uses it." "Just like shoes." 

Rude (Clement Virgo, 1995)

Richard Chevolleau in Rude

Cast: Maurice Dean Witt, Rachael Crawford, Clark Johnson, Richard Chevolleau, Sharon Lewis, Melanie Nicholls-King, Stephen Shellen, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Dayo Ade, Dean Marshall, Ashley Brown. Screenplay: Clement Virgo. Cinematography: Barry Stone. Production design: William Fleming. Film editing: Susan Maggi. Music: Aaron David, John Lang. 

In his first feature film, Rude, Clement Virgo makes the rookie mistake of trying to do too much, telling stories of three residents of the Toronto neighborhood Regent Park when just one story would be enough. They are familiar stories, too: an ex-con trying to avoid being drawn back into drug-running, a closeted gay man fearful of being outed, and a young woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Virgo ties them all together with the running commentary of a disc jockey called Rude (Sharon Lewis), on her pirate radio show. Fortunately, Virgo has chosen capable actors and he displays a great deal of cinematic style that almost overcomes the familiarity of the material.  

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Sam Locke, Robert Rhodes, Ghazi Al Ruffai, Maura Bird, Connor Newall, Lewis Ashbourne Serkis, Mirren Mack, David Sterne, Cillian Murphy. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Carson McCall, Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir. 

A pandemic has swept the world, leaving the survivors at the mercy of the worst among them. Good thing it's just a movie, right? I won't say that Alex Garland, who gave us Civil War (2024), about an American citizenry at odds with its government, didn't have something more in mind than a post-apocalyptic Britain, so let's just keep in mind Oscar Wilde's pronouncement: "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." On the surface, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a worthy successor to, maybe even an improvement on, Danny Boyle's 2025 film 28 Years Later, which introduced Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a solo survivor fending off those infected by the Rage Virus we first encountered in Boyle and Garland's 28 Days Later (2003). Film series usually peter out after one or two sequels, but this one has somehow gotten stronger. (I'm not going to say it's because life has copied art, to invoke another Wilde aphorism.) Nia DaCosta's direction is sure-handed, and the cast is more than up to the often gruesome demands of the script. The ending, reintroducing Cillian Murphy as Jim, the survivor from 28 Days Later who hasn't aged much in 28 years, lets us know a sequel is on the way, and for once I don't mind.