Film reviews: The Apprentice | Since Yesterday | A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things | The Wild Robot | The Crime is Mine

Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands (15) ★★★★☆

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (PG) ★★★★☆

The Wild Robot (U) ★★★☆☆

The Crime is Mine (15) ★★★☆☆

Donald Trump gets an origins story with The Apprentice, a somewhat lacerating biopic focusing on his relationship with Roy Cohn, the ruthless lawyer and notorious New York fixer whose brutal tactics set the young would-be property magnate on his narcissistic path to power. Starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, it’s essentially a Frankenstein-esque story about the birth of a monster, with director Ali Abbasi (who made the sly creature feature Border) presenting the young, teetotal Donald as an already petulant mass of grievances who finds in Cohn a father-figure willing to indulge the rampant self-belief Trump’s own property developer father Fred (Martin Donovan) is stingier about affirming.

Smartly splitting the film between Donald’s shaky rise in the bankrupted New York of the 1970s and his arrival in the 1980s as the ultimate greed-is-good poster boy for Reagan’s America, Abbasi marks this division by moving from grainy film stock to the garish glare of analogue video. It’s a change that not only separates these eras in an appropriately formalistic way, but symbolically represents the brazenness with which Trump takes Cohn’s fight-dirty approach from sordid backrooms into the open, normalising it with the publication of his best-selling memoir The Art of the Deal.

As Trump, Stan doesn’t make the mistake of doing an impression; instead he gives us flashes of the gestures, vocal tics and mannerisms with which we’re all now overly familiar. But it’s Strong’s ability to locate in Cohn the pathetic core of a closeted bully (his decline coincides with the AIDS crisis) that reinforces the danger of the man he helped make — a man who ruthlessly turns on him and will, in time, supplant Nixon (whose “I’m not a crook” speech opens the film) as the bête noire of American democracy.

Co-directed by Blair Young and musician Carla J. Easton, Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands fulfils its titular promise by excavating the stories of a handful of bands that might have had a seminal influence on the music scene had it not been so regressive. Easton, who also narrates the film and fronted the all-women indie pop band TeenCanteen in the 2010s, acknowledges early on the very term ‘Girl Band’ is loaded and reductive, but embraces it anyway to draw attention to the noticeable gap in the history of the otherwise vibrant Scottish music scene where all-female pop, rock and punk bands should – but don’t – reside.

Visualising this gap as a little girl’s bedroom wall ready to be filled with posters of bands that might inspire their own creative ambitions, the film takes us on a chronological journey, one that takes in the swinging sixties, punk and the 1980s chart success of Strawberry Switchblade, on through the emergence of Riot grrrl in the 1990s and into the 21st century, where things should, in theory, have been better.

With many of the main players interviewed, there are plenty of bittersweet revelations about careers that were prematurely ended by pregnancy (or stalled by the mere possibility of pregnancy). There are plenty of tales, too, of having to endure casual misogyny, sexual assault and exploitation.

But there’s a lot of joy as well in the sense of freedom that comes from making music. Because Easton is an insider, the film is authoritative about what it means for women and girls to make music together and, though it doesn’t make any great claims about the levels of success these thwarted bands might have achieved, it makes a convincing case for why their existence mattered.

In A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, Mark Cousins casts his gaze on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, the under-appreciated Scottish abstract painter whose geometrically minded work reflected her unique perspective on the world, one driven by her own synaesthesia (she saw colours as numbers) and her incursions into nature, most notably a hike up the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in 1949 that was to prove transformative. Cousins recreates the hike in the film as part of his own abstract look at her life and work, eschewing the standard tropes of biography in favour of putting us inside her head. Regular collaborator Tilda Swinton provides additional context narrating from Barns-Grahams’ letters and diaries.

Adapted from Peter Brown’s magnificent children’s novel, The Wild Robot is a sometimes dazzling, sometimes frustrating adventure that captures some of the spirit of the book, but adds unnecessarily treacly speeches to ram home its themes. The latter feel particularly egregious because of how well the film – beautifully animated using a more painterly style – actually sets up and streamlines the book’s story of a next-gen Siri/Alexa-style helper robot called Roz (Lupito Nyong’o) that gets washed up on a verdant island and finds itself tasked with raising Brightbill, a gosling whose family she accidentally kills. Alas, as Roz bonds more deeply with Brightbill and a friendless fox called Fink (voiced by Pedro Pascal), the film’s approach to teasing out the book’s complex ideas about nature and nurture get a little heavy-handed.

The prolific and mercurial François Ozon returns with another of his periodic descents into frothy period pastiche. Like his earlier film 8 Women, The Crime is Mine is a starry, screwball murder mystery, this time built around an aspiring actress (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) in 1930s Paris who confesses to a crime she didn’t commit in order to use the notoriety to launch her career. Isabelle Huppert steals the film as a formerly huge silent film star with a secret of her own.

All films on release from 18 October.