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A watch. A painting. A chicken dinner. A snippet of conversation.

These and other everyday pieces of a life take on greater significance and heartbreaking meaning throughout the course of “The Father.” They’re at once mundane and unreliable, tactile and elusive within the ever-shifting mind of Anthony Hopkins ’ character, an 80-year-old Londoner succumbing to dementia.

Writer/director Florian Zeller , adapting his prize-winning, 2012 French play of the same name with the help of the legendary Christopher Hampton (“ Dangerous Liaisons ,” “ Atonement ”), has pulled off a dazzling feat here. He puts us within the mind of the ailing Hopkins’ Anthony, allowing us to experience his confusion as if it were our own. But he also offers the perspective of the caretakers and loved ones who try to settle his volatile temper and organize his jumbled memories. We never know what’s true—or who, for that matter, as characters come and go and take on various names and identities, depending on his recognition of them. Everything is fleeting and yet each specific moment feels urgent and real.

Struggling to navigate this muddied mélange of past and present is a brilliant Hopkins, giving a performance that’s both charismatic and ferocious, sometimes within the same breath. There’s mind-blowing specificity to his technique here as he’s called upon to convey a wide range of feelings and emotions, but also a softness and openness we’ve rarely seen from him. It’s some of the absolute best work of Hopkins’ lengthy and storied career.

And as his daughter, Anne, Olivia Colman is consistently his equal. She, too, must ride this roller coaster and struggle to put on a British, stiff upper lip within a situation that’s steadily crumbling. She’ll manage a smile as tears well in her eyes or flinch ever so slightly yet maintain her patience when her father says something rude and insulting. As our guide—as much as Zeller will allow us one—Colman is tremendous as always.

But mainly we see the world through Anthony’s eyes, and at first, that seems like a pretty peaceful place to be. When we spy him initially, he’s listening to opera on a pleasant afternoon in his spacious, tastefully appointed London flat. But soon, Anne stops by to visit and informs him she’s met someone and is moving to Paris to be with him. His demeanor changes instantly and, feeling wounded, he lashes out: “You?” he asks incredulously. “You mean, a man?” Later, as the long-term reality of this news hits him, he reveals a deeper layer of hurt: “So if I understand correctly, you’re leaving me, is that it? You’re abandoning me.” His face falls a bit but he still tries to exert a measure of control and bravado.

Some version of this sort of conversation happens again and again—over where he placed his beloved watch, for example, or the cruel treatment he inflicted upon his previous at-home caregiver. And just when we think we’re getting into the rhythm of “The Father,” it changes the tempo and the players. Maybe this isn’t Anthony’s flat—maybe it’s Anne’s and she’s taken him in to stay with her. Maybe she has a husband after all, named Paul ( Rufus Sewell ), with whom she still lives. And maybe now she’s being played by Olivia Williams in a clever bit of casting, given their similar features. The arrival of Imogen Poots as a potential candidate to look after Anthony provides some sunshine, as it gives him the opportunity to flirt with a pretty young woman. He’s randy and charming as he declares playfully, “Time for an aperitif!” But she also reminds him of his other daughter, who was an artist, and whatever happened to that painting of hers that was hanging above the mantle … ? Anthony’s first meeting with Poots’ Laura is a great example of what a shock it can be when Zeller pulls the rug out from underneath us—never in gimmicky fashion, but rather as a reflection of the jarring changes occurring within the character’s mind and mood. We feel them, too.

But while some moments of memory loss cause a jolt in the story and give Hopkins room to express his character’s frustration grandly, what’s happening throughout with the production design and editing is so subtle, it’ll make you want to rewind a few seconds just to appreciate the slight changes. Whether it’s different tiles on the kitchen backsplash, a rearranged bedroom or a white grocery bag instead of a blue one holding the chicken to roast that night, production designer Peter Francis vividly creates various versions of this same, enclosed setting. And what editor Yorgos Lamprinos does here is so complicated and yet so understated, it’s like a magic trick right before our eyes. Lamprinos, our Los Angeles Film Critics Association winner for best editing, had the daunting task of crafting a story that’s simultaneously confusing and compelling, and he rose elegantly to that challenge. And the score from Ludovico Einaudi , whose music also appeared recently in Chloé Zhao ’s gorgeous “ Nomadland ,” mirrors the performances in the way it tugs at our hearts without being mawkish.

The fluid nature of the narrative calls to mind Charlie Kaufman ’s achingly melancholy drama “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” from last fall. While Kaufman’s story was deeply steeped in his trademark surrealism, what’s so sad about both films is the way they portray the notions of home and family—which should be safe harbors—as ephemeral. The people and imagery we rely on to define us may look familiar, but there’s something slightly off, and that’s deeply unsettling. I suspect it will be especially so for viewers who’ve experienced such a decline with members of their own family. But perhaps it will provide some solace, as well.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Father (2021)

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic material.

Anthony Hopkins as Anthony

Olivia Colman as Anne

Mark Gatiss as The Man

Olivia Williams as The Woman

Imogen Poots as Laura

Rufus Sewell as Paul

Ayesha Dharker as Dr Sarai

Florian Zeller

Writer (play)

Christopher Hampton

Cinematographer

Ben Smithard
Yorgos Lamprinos
Ludovico Einaudi

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In “The Father’s” house are many rooms, all of them beautifully appointed with details so sharp and precise that you might be startled to find them vanishing a few moments later: Didn’t those backsplash tiles look different a minute ago? Wasn’t there a lamp on that side table? The French writer-director Florian Zeller, adapting his internationally acclaimed play for the screen, has a meticulous eye and a keen sense of mischief, which doesn’t lighten so much as heighten the implacable tragedy at the heart of this story. The moment-to-moment pleasures of trying to decipher the plot give way to crushing futility; you’re left sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that’s almost too painful to solve.

Those pieces have been plucked from the life of an 80-year-old Englishman named Anthony. Known as André in the play, he has been renamed here in honor of his interpreter, Anthony Hopkins, who repays it with a performance of extraordinary psychological cunning and emotional force. We first encounter Anthony in a darkened London apartment, listening to a recording of Henry Purcell and John Dryden’s 1691 dramatic opera “King Arthur, or the British Worthy.” Before long his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), comes in and the music stops, though not before the opening lines of an aria have rung out: “What power art thou, who from below / Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow / From beds of everlasting snow?”

The opera reference is a studied choice but an apt one: Soon enough, a deep, menacing chill descends on this movie like a fog and stays there, wrapping around the mind of a man trying to shake off his slumber. Less an unreliable narrator than an unreliable observer, Anthony is in a rapidly advancing state of dementia, a condition that manifests itself in fugue states, memory lapses and volatile fits of temper. His fierce tantrums have recently burned through a series of in-home nurses, leaving Anne at her wits’ end. This much of the situation is clear enough, mainly because it keeps getting reiterated for Anthony’s benefit — patiently by Anne, who tries to coax him into behaving , and more resentfully by her husband, Paul (Rufus Sewell), who occasionally turns up to protest the disruption of their once stable, comfortable lives.

Anthony, for his part, has a rather different understanding of who’s intruding on whom. His daughter sometimes becomes a stranger. He is visited and attended to by others he doesn’t recognize, played with gently obliging smiles by actors including Imogen Poots, Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams. (In addition to the doubled Anthonys, the casting of two equally superb Olivias slyly compounds the confusion.) He mutters and rants about unwanted caretakers and stolen possessions, namely the watch that keeps vanishing from his wrist — an effective if on-the-nose nod to his slippery sense of time. He reacts to each new piece of information with skepticism and fascination as if he were an investigator making a surprising discovery rather than a man losing his grip on reality.

“The Father,” in other words, is both a detective story and a study in confinement, a mystery set within the labyrinthine recesses of a deteriorating mind. The original play (whose English translator, Christopher Hampton, is credited alongside Zeller for the screenplay) availed itself of the natural abstractions of theatrical space, turning the stage into a psychological hall of mirrors. But Zeller, making an elegant and incisive feature debut, finds an ideal equivalent within the more realistic parameters of the movie screen. The airlessness that stifles so many stage-to-screen adaptations only serves to reinforce this film’s mood of entrapment, barely diminished by the opera selections and the recurring strains of Ludovico Einaudi‘s original score. The imposing physicality of the apartment makes it that much more startling when the movie begins to undermine its own premises.

I mean premises quite literally. The flat features a long hallway that seems to stretch toward infinity, with doors that lead into interconnected, sometimes interchangeable-looking rooms. Ben Smithard’s deep-focus widescreen compositions with restrained lighting and slightly muted colors confound your sense of direction, even as they invite you to rummage through the details of Peter Francis’ intricate production design. And as those details — the tiles and that painting, the pottery and the furniture — begin to shift imperceptibly from scene to scene, our understanding of time, space and reality begins to rupture in concert with Anthony’s. (Among recent movies, “The Father” would make quite a haunted-house triple bill with “Relic” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which also dramatize cognitive decay via compulsively mutating decor.)

How closely do Zeller’s formal conceits approximate the real, lived experience of dementia? The answer to that question is fundamentally unknowable and possibly irrelevant; as we’ve seen from “Away From Her,” “Still Alice” and other fine dramas about the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on a family, this kind of radically subjective storytelling isn’t a prerequisite for empathy or emotional truth. Even still, the rigorous interiority of “The Father” compels your attention: If narrative cinema is largely predicated on the illusion of seamlessness, there’s something apt about the way Zeller both upholds and shatters that illusion, bridging the narrative gap across a series of jarring discontinuities. You can imagine the mind doing something similar, struggling for lucidity in the wake of mounting incoherence.

But you don’t need to imagine it, because for the entirety of the movie’s fleet 97-minute running time, Hopkins embodies it. His Anthony can be vulnerable and fierce, broken and defiant: His moments of verbal acuity and self-aware humor exist on a continuum with his equally sudden lapses into oblivion. In one scene, he disarms a visitor with flirtatious charm and even does an impromptu dance only to turn the tables with stinging viciousness: It’s not clear if this is the real Anthony, in full, ferocious possession of his faculties, or an unrecognizably distorted version of him or some strange conflation of both. We see both the singular, towering personality he once was and the fumbling fragility to which he will soon be reduced.

If it feels redundant to invoke Shakespeare with regard to this particular actor, it also seems like more than happenstance that Hopkins, having recently played King Lear in a 2018 TV adaptation, has now stepped into a role with obvious Learian overtones. This is, as its title suggests, the story of not just a disintegrating psyche, but also a disintegrating relationship between a father and a daughter whose love he can no longer see or feel. “The Father” may be a remarkable feat of sustained identification, but beyond the margins of Anthony’s experience — and primarily in the figure of Anne, whom Colman brings to aching, tremulous life — we catch glimpses of other characters and other stories: a terrible accident, a broken marriage, a second chance at love.

These stories may be half-buried memories or hallucinatory projections, but they are real enough to mark “The Father” as more than just one man’s tragedy. The film’s final embrace is a quietly astounding vision of grace in solitude, and it harks back to that opening aria, with its invocation of eternal winter and the unheard rejoinder that follows: “ ’Tis Love, ’tis Love, ’tis Love that has warm’d us.”

‘The Father’ Rating: PG-13, for some strong language, and thematic material Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: Starts Feb. 26 at Vineland Drive-In, City of Industry; available March 26 on PVOD platforms

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The Father Reviews

Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning act leaves you with a heavy heart.

Full Review | Jan 10, 2024

The great Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony, an eighty-something-year-old man who’s constantly at war with his own cognition.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Through our protagonist’s mental condition, we witness how human consciousness turns against us. That an ill mind can make a cruel and grotesque joke about our very existence, setting up a punch line that will tear down the world we thought we lived in.

The Father is an overwhelmingly devastating depiction of the painfully progressive disease that is dementia. Anthony Hopkins delivers an award-worthy, powerfully compelling performance. One of the best movies I've seen in the last couple of years.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 24, 2023

The Father has, like his [protagonist's] mind, an elliptical structure, made of holes and voids. Allowing us to get lost and confounded in its thrilleresque atmosphere... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 3, 2023

An act of empathic genius.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 9, 2022

“The Father” is a tough watch. But the bold choices, the emotional honesty, the crisp detailed storytelling, and the tour de force performance from Anthony Hopkins (among other things) make every second worthwhile.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 17, 2022

The script ensnares us into the life of this man, though the audiovisual elements could've been more inspired. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 11, 2022

The Father deserves recognition and appreciation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 3, 2022

It is not just a film that you watch, it is a film that you experience - mind, body, and soul.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | May 13, 2022

Capped by one of the most harrowing speeches youll see all year, The Father belongs in that special category of films that are brilliant but may require a bit of a break before you see them again

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 2, 2022

It's an incredibly accomplished, well-structured chamber drama, aided in its translation to English by playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 12, 2022

Not only is the film absolutely affecting, but the sheer confidence that it carries would be impressive for any film much less a directorial debut.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

The film does what Christopher Nolan keeps trying and failing at, which is to ever so gingerly reach into our minds and tweak out the corners and meaty pieces of our perceptions, before we even notice what's being done

Full Review | Jan 14, 2022

Extraordinary. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2021

Director Florian Zeller makes light work of this adaption of his play, using the camera to recreate the claustrophobia and uncertainty of relying on an uncertain mind.

Full Review | Nov 6, 2021

Anthony Hopkins is one of the best actors alive right now, undoubtedly. The Father was one of the best surprises of 2020, with an incredible visual concept that blows my mind when I think this is Zeller's first film. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Oct 22, 2021

[Much] of the strength of the film lies in Anthony Hopkins' lead performance alongside Olivia Colman, Zeller's direction is nothing to sniff at.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 8, 2021

It's a film that's worth more for its conception and execution than its ideological discourse or social agenda. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 29, 2021

Memory is not linear, and 'The Father' captures what it must feel like when memories stop connecting. Anthony Hopkins gives one of his great performances.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2021

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‘the father’: film review | sundance 2020.

Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman play a dementia-afflicted man and his daughter in 'The Father,' Florian Zeller's screen adaptation of his own play.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago, The Father takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted. Fronted by a stupendous performance from Anthony Hopkins as a proud Englishman in denial of his condition, this penetrating work marks an outstanding directorial debut by the play’s French author Florian Zeller and looks to be a significant title for Sony Classics domestically later in the year.

First performed in France in 2012, the play has elicited hosannas wherever it has appeared, notably in Paris, where it won the 2014 Moliere Award for best play, in the U.K. from 2014 to 2016, and in New York, where Frank Langella won a Tony Award for his lead performance in 2016. Christopher Hampton did the English adaptation and receives co-screenwriting credit here.

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Anthony Hopkins' dementia drama The Father is a quiet revelation: Review

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

T he Father is hardly the first prestige drama to address dementia — in fact, it's actually the third in this past month alone, after Supernova and the Viggo Mortenson-helmed Falling — but it manages to do something films like this rarely do: portray the real-time ravages of the disease from the inside out.

That writer-director Florian Zeller, working from his own acclaimed 2012 French-language play Le Pére , is able to turn devastating illness into a kind of disjointed poetry — and one still threaded with real emotional resonance — is a testament to his skill as a first-time filmmaker. But also to the beautifully shaded performances he elicits from his stars, including Anthony Hopkins as Anthony, a retired engineer falling deeper into the twilit recesses of his mind, and Olivia Colman as his long-suffered daughter and caretaker.

A proudly dapper gentleman of a certain age, Anthony mostly potters around the confines of his spacious London flat (or is it really his?), and seems to take a combative pleasure in provoking Colman's beleaguered Anne, whether he's needling her about her love life or roundly dismissing her attempts to bring in professional minders to look after him. They're all petty thieves, he insists, and entirely unnecessary anyway.

But the faces of these various home aids (played primarily by Imogen Poots and Olivia Williams) seem to shift in ways that increasingly don't make sense to him; so too do the men (Rufus Sewell and Mark Gatiss) Anne is supposedly married to. And where is his other grown daughter, the one that Poots' pretty, laughing Laura reminds him of?

The less Anthony is sure of, the more imperious he tends to be — puffed with outraged dignity one moment and coolly dismissive the next. He bluffs and bristles, wheedles and charms; at one point, he even does a jaunty little soft-shoe. Still, the threads of his life are loosening, and Hopkins' eyes, still a keen Siberian-husky blue, register more and more that things are not where and how they should be.

Though nearly of all this takes place inside apartment walls, Zeller somehow staves off claustrophobia; there's a warm, painterly quality to the light that pours in, and a graceful pacing to the script (translated and adapted by Atonement screenwriter Christopher Hampton) that allows its growing resonance to creep in, quietly.

The skillfulness of the telling, paradoxically, can make The Father feel at times almost too painful to sit through; as the story shifts elliptically in and out of time, Anthony's losses become our own. By its end though, the movie has become a profoundly moving meditation not just on perception and reality, but also on the limits of familial care — and all the ways that illness can make the people we love the most unrecognizable, even to themselves. Grade: B+

( The Father is in select theaters Friday and comes to VOD March 26.)

The Father review – Anthony Hopkins drives devastating dementia drama

A brutal, trippy portrait of what it must feel like to lose your grip on reality boasts an Oscar-worthy performance

M ost years at Sundance, usually within the midnight movies strand, a horror film breaks out, terrifying all those able to endure it, kickstarting a buzz that continues through to release with poster quotes daring only the bravest of audiences to go see. In previous years there’s been Saw, Hereditary, Get Out, The Babadook and The Blair Witch Project but this year, the scariest film isn’t about a sadistic killer or an evil cult. It’s not even a scary movie in any traditional sense. It’s a film about the bone-chilling horror of living with dementia and it’ll haunt me for weeks.

Based on the acclaimed, award-winning play, The Father starts out as a deceptively simple drama hinged on a deceptively familiar dynamic. Anne (Olivia Colman) is losing patience with her 80-year-old father, Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), whose grip on reality is fading but who refuses to allow a carer to look after him. She’s moving to Paris and needs to ensure his safety while she is away so before she leaves she must find someone who will endure him. For Anthony, life has become a source of ever-disorienting confusion and in a masterful stroke, the writer-director Florian Zeller (who created the original stage production) tells the story from his eyes as characters and locations shift and we become as muddled as he.

Anthony is essentially a character in a trippy thriller who exists in a real world drama. He thinks he’s being gaslighted in one moment and in the other he questions the very nature of his existence as his daughter is suddenly someone else (confusingly for us, it’s another Olivia: Olivia Williams) and his apartment has been refurnished in a matter of moments. It’s an ingenious way to convey the horrifying state of mind of someone with dementia, how every day is filled with sudden shocks and how impossible it must be to let someone else understand just what you’re going through. We’re mostly in one location but due to the ever-changing nature of Anthony’s surroundings, Zeller’s film is one of the more impressively realised stage-to-screen adaptations of late. There are constant tweaks made to his apartment from the decor to the layout and we begin to question everything along with him, always wondering what the real truth might be.

It’s a difficult, often quite brutal, viewing experience, as it needs to be given the subject matter, not only because of the fractured storytelling but because of the devastating lead performance from Hopkins, experiencing something of a career resurgence with an Oscar nomination this year for The Two Popes. He’s now comfortably an early front-runner for the 2021 race with a turn so crushingly effective that I can’t see how any other actor could beat him. It’s astounding, heartbreaking work, watching him try to rationally explain to himself and those around him what he’s experiencing. In some of the film’s most quietly upsetting moments, his world has shifted yet again but he remains silent, knowing that any attempt to question what he’s woken up to will only fall on deaf ears. Hopkins runs the full gamut from fury to outrage to upset and never once does it feel like a constructed character bit, despite our association with him as an actor with a storied career. It’s breathtaking to watch him here but also incredibly harrowing.

It’s his show but Colman gets some impactful moments along the way and the film is generous enough to understand that it’s an unbearably frustrating process for those around someone with the condition as well. As one might expect, The Father is a hopeless tale, with Zeller taking us down further as the condition worsens with the knowledge that things won’t be getting any better, that he won’t be getting out. It’s an experience many people will understandably want to avoid, existing just too close to home for a lot of us, easily swapping out Hopkins and inserting a family member in his place. But for those who can stomach it, it’ll stay with you, for longer than you might like. I know it will stay with me.

The Father is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date yet to be announced

Sundance 2020
First look review
Sundance film festival
Drama films
Anthony Hopkins
Olivia Colman
Olivia Williams

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‘The Father’ Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives a Tour-de-Force Performance

Anthony Hopkins delivers a tour-de-force performance in Florian Zeller's drama of dementia, which puts us in the mind of a man who's losing his.

By Owen Gleiberman

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'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives a Tour-de-Force Performance

There have been some good dramas about people sliding into dementia, like “Away From Her” and “Still Alice,” but I confess I almost always have a problem with them. As the person at the center of the movie begins to recede from her adult children, from the larger world, and from herself, he or she also recedes — at least, this is my experience — from the audience. I have never been sure how to get around that, but in “ The Father ,” the French playwright and novelist Florian Zeller, making his auspicious debut as a feature-film director (the movie is based on his 2014 play), has found a way.

At the beginning, Anne ( Olivia Colman ), in London, returns to her large, stately, and tastefully cozy book-lined flat, with its sky-blue walls, and greets her father, Anthony ( Anthony Hopkins ), who is 80 years old and needs looking after. His memory has been slipping, though he hasn’t lost his feisty combative spirit — qualities we’ve come to expect from Anthony Hopkins, though in this film they’re merely the first couple of onion layers of a brilliant, mercurial, and moving performance. Anthony, in what we’re led to believe is typical behavior for him, has subjected his most recent caregiver to so much cantankerous abuse that she quit. Anne could hire another one, but it’s not that simple. As she finally tells him, she’s moving to Paris to be with the man she loves. What’s right on her lips — but she can’t bring herself to say it — is that it’s probably time for Anthony to go into a nursing home.

Strolling into the living room, he encounters a man sitting there calmly, reading The Guardian. It’s his daughter’s husband (Mark Gatiss); they all live together in the house. Moments later, the daughter returns, but it’s a different woman from before (now played by Olivia Williams), who announces that she’s bought a chicken to cook for dinner. Anthony, stunned by this shift in reality, tries to adjust and makes a reference to the husband — and she looks at him with a blank stare. There is no husband. (She was divorced five years ago.) There’s no chicken, either.

Which scenario is real, and which one has Anthony hallucinated? We can’t quite tell, but in each case what we’re seeing feels real, and that’s the film’s ingenious gambit. In “The Father,” Zeller plants us inside a convincing homespun reality only to reveal that it was a mirage; before our eyes, the solidity turns to quicksand. Or was the reality before it the mirage? The film gives us small sharp clues to get our bearings, and each time we do it pulls the rug out again, seducing us into thinking that this time we’re on firm ground.

“The Father” does something that few movies about mental deterioration in old age have brought off in quite this way, or this fully. It places us in the mind of someone losing his mind — and it does so by revealing that mind to be a place of seemingly rational and coherent experience. At times, the film seems to be putting King Lear in the Twilight Zone; at others, it’s like “The Shining” with Harold Pinter soap opera in place of demons. “The Father” is a chamber piece, but it has the artistic verve to keep twisting the reality it shows us without becoming a stunt. And that’s because there’s a raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light saddened desperation to it. Anthony isn’t just “fantasizing.” He’s seeing true-blue pieces of his life dance with primal enactments of his fears. His mind is like a vivid but faulty TV remote — it’s clinging to life even as it clicks to the next everyday dream.

Anne returns, introducing a new caregiver, Laura (Imogen Poots), who is so youthful and vibrant that she lifts Anthony’s spirit, to the point that he flirts and pours some whiskeys. She reminds him of Anne’s sister, Lucy, who’s an artist (several of her paintings hang on the walls). But there’s a hush in the air every time Lucy’s name is mentioned. Also on hand is Anne’s husband — I mean her real husband, Paul, played by Rufus Sewell with such cuttingly plausible resentment that we know in our guts he’s truly there. He’s the one pushing, harder than anyone, for Anthony to go into a home.

Watching “The Father,” we’re drawn right into the I-see-ghosts-can’t-you-see-them-too? experience of dementia. But we also put together the puzzle of Anthony’s life, and what gets to us is that we’re gathering the pieces even as he’s losing them, one by one. He keeps scrambling up the identities of the people close to him, which allows Zeller to play neat tricks with his actors. And Anthony both knows it and doesn’t know it. Because like any of us he believes what he sees. All the actors in “The Father” are vivid (Colman brings her role a loving vulnerability that warms you), but Hopkins is flat-out stunning. He acts, for a while, with grizzled charm and roaring certainty, but the quality that holds his performance together, and begins to take it over, is a cosmic confusion laced with terror. Anthony is losing more than his memory — he’s losing himself. The triumph of Hopkins’ acting is that even as he does, you’re right there with him.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 27, 2020. Running time: 97 MIN.

Production: (U.K.-France) A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Trademark Films, Cine@, Embankment Films, Film4, Viewfinder production. Producers: Simon Friend, Christophe Spadone, Philippe Carcassonne, Jean-Louis Livi, David Parfitt. Executive producers: Lauren Dark, Ollie Madden, Daniel Battsek, Hugo Grumbar, Tim Haslam, Paul Grindey, Zygi Kamasa.
Crew: Director: Florian Zeller. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller. Camera: Ben Smithard. Editor: Yorgos Lamprinos. Music: Ludovico Einaudi.
With: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots , Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams.

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Movie Reviews

In 'the father,' anthony hopkins' mind is playing tricks on him — and on you.

Justin Chang

In The Father , Anthony Hopkins plays a man with dementia, and Olivia Coleman is the daughter whose name he occasionally forgets. Sean Gleason/Sony Pictures Classics hide caption

In The Father , Anthony Hopkins plays a man with dementia, and Olivia Coleman is the daughter whose name he occasionally forgets.

There have been many fine films over the past several years about characters struggling with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, like Away From Her , Still Alice and the recent Colin Firth / Stanley Tucci drama Supernova . But few of them have gone as deeply and unnervingly into the recesses of a deteriorating mind as The Father , a powerful new chamber drama built around a mesmerizing lead performance from Anthony Hopkins.

At this point in his long career, Hopkins would seem to have exhausted his ability to surprise us, but his work here is nothing short of astonishing. He shows us a man whose mind has become a prison, and we're trapped in it right alongside him.

Movie Interviews

'we don't know what's coming': anthony hopkins plays 'the father' with dementia.

His character, also named Anthony, is 80 years old and has dementia. At the beginning of the movie, his daughter, Anne — played by the superb Olivia Colman — stops by his London apartment to check on him. Her father's condition has taken a turn for the worse, and his fits of temper have become severe enough to send his latest live-in nurse packing.

Anthony is stubborn and defiant and insists that he can manage on his own. But that's clearly not the case, given his habit of misplacing his things, like the watch that keeps mysteriously vanishing from his wrist, and his inability to remember names and faces, Anne's included.

Filmmaker Faces Her Father's Mortality By Staging His 'Death' Again And Again

As The Father goes on, the more it becomes clear that it's his own mind that's playing tricks on him. What makes the movie so unsettling is the way it wires us directly into his subjective experience, so that the foundations of the story seem to shift at random from scene to scene. We're adrift in a sea of Anthony's memories; each new plot development undermines the one before it.

A man suddenly appears in the apartment, claiming to be Anne's husband, which is odd, since just a few moments earlier, Anne seemed to be single. Anne goes out shopping for groceries, but when she returns, she's played not by Olivia Colman but by another actress, Olivia Williams.

The apartment itself, brilliantly designed by Peter Francis, begins to shift of its own accord. You notice puzzling discrepancies — wasn't there a lamp on that hallway table just a moment ago? Weren't those kitchen cabinets a completely different color? — and suddenly realize that Anthony's mind is blurring different time frames together. At some point, it becomes unclear whether we're in Anthony's apartment or Anne's apartment, into which Anthony has been moved since he can no longer live on his own.

The Father is thus both a psychological detective story and a stealth haunted-house movie. It's an exceedingly clever and polished piece of filmmaking, and it marks an impressive feature debut for the French writer-director Florian Zeller, adapting his own popular play with the veteran screenwriter Christopher Hampton .

You can sense how well this material must have worked on stage, where it's easier to slip between layers of reality. But it works beautifully onscreen, too. The general complaint about most stage-to-screen adaptations is that they wind up feeling too airless and claustrophobic. But those qualities are if anything a bonus in The Father , deepening its portrait of cognitive entrapment.

Code Switch

Portrait of a parent with alzheimer's.

Remarkably, none of the movie's dazzling surface tricks undermine the emotion at its core. The story in The Father may be scrambled, but it's also heartbreakingly simple: A man grows old and loses his memory, and his daughter, after a lifetime of love and devotion, must begin the long, agonizing process of saying goodbye.

Hopkins could deliver this performance on an empty soundstage with no loss of impact. He shows us Anthony's struggle to keep his wits about him, the way he reaches for humor — and then anger — as a means of keeping the inevitable at bay. By the end, though, his every last defense has been stripped away, and Hopkins lays the character bare with a vulnerability I've rarely seen from him or any actor. It's a devastating performance — and an impossible one to forget.

The Father Review

A career-capping tour-de-force from anthony hopkins..

The Father is now available on premium VOD.

The Father is the first film by 41-year-old playwright Florian Zeller, though it feels like the work of a seasoned master in his twilight years. Based on Zeller’s French-language play Le Père and its English translation by Christopher Hampton — Zeller and Hampton also co-wrote the screenplay — the story follows retired London engineer Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) down a rabbit-hole of progressive memory loss, as his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) attempts to care for him. The film turns its limited sets and spaces into a reflection of Anthony’s increasingly askew perceptions, filling the soundscape with the haunting strings of composer Ludovico Einaudi, and the disembodied echoes of conversations past. It’s a masterwork of both technical filmmaking and soulful drama, packed into a brisk 97 minutes that feels, by design, both like an eternity and like fleeting moments slipping through your fingers like water.

The Father has racked up six Oscar nominations . Its recognition in these categories — Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and Production Design — feels indicative of its precise assembly and conception. What the Oscars do and don’t get “right” is a matter of taste, but for an under-discussed, under-exposed contender like The Father, the nominations alone feel like justice served, regardless of who ends up winning. The Best Actor trophy will likely be awarded to the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), and rightly so, but The Father also features a performance for the history books by the legendary Hopkins, who, at the age of 82, delivers arguably the most riveting work of his already storied career, a performance made all the more powerful by the way it’s framed.

What separates The Father from other films about aging is, for lack of a better word, its gimmick. The film seems to skip around in time as if to capture jumbled memories half-recalled, but it also roots its narrative in a singular, linear present, following Anthony across what feels like a couple of days, at least to him. It’s told mostly through his unreliable point of view, one filled with paranoia and frustration at the world around him, and at what he perceives as lies and patronizing deceptions. Before long, the film takes a sharp turn into eerie territory by suddenly recasting central roles, like Anthony’s daughter (Colman is, at one point, swapped out for Olivia Williams). A mysterious man even appears in his apartment — sometimes played by Mark Gatiss, other times by Rufus Sewell — claiming to be his son-in-law, and claiming that the apartment isn’t Anthony’s at all. It’s a trick so effective at robbing Anthony, and the viewer, of the luxury of recognition that you’re left wondering why more filmmakers don’t use it.

Zeller’s directing is economic — nearly every shot has a dual purpose, delivering emotional information through performance, and factual information framed in its peripheries — but it’s also fundamentally untrustworthy, placing us within Anthony’s headspace as he attempts to grasp his surroundings. When Anthony mentions some event or line of dialogue from earlier in a scene, the other characters suddenly have no idea what he’s talking about. If the film didn’t occasionally step back to present an “objective” vantage, it would feel like surrealist horror. Details subtly shift in his apartment, first in ways you don’t quite notice, but then in more sweeping and obvious ways that don’t make logical sense. The film features only a handful of locations, but it presents them remarkably, re-dressing and re-painting what appears to be a single set, so that as the story progresses, everything feels, at once, both alien and familiar.

Hopkins captures this conflict of perspective in heartbreaking fashion. In one moment, Anthony is bound by his convictions and has a temper to match them; “I am not leaving my flat!” he bellows, at the mere suggestion of assisted living. In the next moment, all sense of certainty slips away from him, which he tries desperately to conceal beneath a brittle veneer of confidence. His sentences begin with agreements, like “Ah, yes”, “Of course!” and “That’s right,” but the shudder in his voice, and the far-away look in his eyes, betray terror and self-pity.

However, Hopkins doesn’t simply play the dementia. Anthony isn’t his disease, but a fully formed person whose experiences and muddled memories keep fighting back against it, and against his fears of abandonment. As soon as he’s lucid, he takes immediate advantage of his physical and emotional clarity. For instance, when Anne introduces him to his new caretaker Laura (Imogen Poots), he jokes around and regales her with tall tales, and he even puts on a little tap dance, as if to overcompensate and prove just how in charge of his faculties he really is (finally, a film that taps into the wildly zany energy Hopkins brings to Instagram ). But there’s a devastating irony even to his idiosyncrasies. The first thing you notice about Anthony — in fact, the first thing he’ll tell you — is how much he loves his wristwatch. It helps him keep track of his day and his routine, but it’s something he’s begun to misplace on a regular basis. Time itself is slipping away from him.

The film’s editing (by Yorgos Lamprinos) collapses days, minutes, hours, perhaps even months, into singular moments, as if no time has passed at all. Sometimes, the film even contorts chronology, as Anthony recalls conversations that haven’t happened yet or characters he’s yet to meet. This wouldn’t be possible without a sci-fi wrinkle in a straightforward narrative, but in The Father, it begs the question as to what we’re actually watching. A film, after all, is a memory of sorts — a reflection of past events unfolding in the present — and the more The Father goes on, the more it feels like the increasingly entangled recollections of a demented mind, where names, faces, and events are slotted in for one another if they’re remembered at all.

Anthony Hopkins' Best Movies

Even if his career began and ended with Hannibal Lecter, Sir Anthony Hopkins would still be considered one of the definitive actors of our era. Luckily, the role of Hannibal only scratches the surface of Hopkins' long illustrious career. He's equally adept at playing the hero or villain; the leader of men or the lowly servant. And this range has served him well over the decades.

Witnessing events through Anthony’s eyes is often confusing and terrifying, but it becomes deeply upsetting in the rare moments the film slips out of his perspective, and into Anne’s. Colman plays a subdued counterfoil to the unpredictable Hopkins; where Anthony veers between jovial, brash, fussy, and distressed, Anne is forced to remain centered and calm, even as she navigates the realization that her father views her with suspicion and disdain. She barely keeps her head above water, and Colman wrestles, in grueling fashion, between a smiling, personable front and feeling piercing betrayal — which Anne chooses not to fully express. What would be the point, since Anthony seldom remembers the ways in which he hurts her?

As the scenes progress, and the film even loops back on itself on occasion, it’s hard not to wonder where a story like The Father is headed, or how it could possibly wrap up. It is, by nature, a tale of irrevocable, inevitable tragedy, with no relief or redemption in sight. However, its final scenes prove to be a stunning, soul-wrenching statement on memory, and its inherent contradiction as something both towering and impermanent.

Hopkins, in these closing moments, reaches deep into the depths of loneliness and despair. As an actor, he’s spent decades deconstructing human decisions and the ways people change, in increments. The skill with which he transitions from one thought or emotion to the next — reacting, considering, and feeling so fully as to seldom need words — makes him one of western cinema’s greatest performers. The Father is his magnum opus, allowing him to carefully strip away all dignity and civility from Anthony until all that’s left is a collection of primal impulses, and a living document of love, and care, at its most brutally difficult

Best Reviewed Movies of 2021

Let's have a look at the films released in 2021 that were scored the best of the best by IGN's critics. But first, a few notes: IGN rates its movies on a scale of 0-10. The "best reviewed" movies listed here all scored 8 or above. The IGN review scale labels any film scored 9 as "amazing" and 10 as "masterpiece".

The Father is a devastating masterwork by first-time director Florian Zeller, based on his play Le Père. The film follows an old man with dementia (Anthony Hopkins) and manipulates its editing and set design until you can longer trust your perceptions — much like its main character. It features career-best work from all involved, including Hopkins, as a man trying desperately to cling to his old life, and Olivia Colman as his daughter, who cares for him at great personal cost.

More Reviews by Siddhant Adlakha

Ign recommends.

Review: With a great Anthony Hopkins, 'The Father' is a haunting exploration of dementia

What would it feel like to not recognize your own daughter? Or find your home oddly becoming a place of strange discomfort? While movies often tackle the effects of dementia or Alzheimer’s on patients and their families, director Florian Zeller’s drama “The Father” reaches new heights by putting its audience up close and very personal with the confusion and palpable terror of losing one’s memory.

With exceptional filmmaking and Anthony Hopkins ’ best performance since “Nixon,” “The Father” (★★★★ out of four; rated PG-13; in New York and LA theaters Friday, expanding nationwide March 12, on video on demand March 26) is an immersive character study of an elderly man struggling to rationalize his existence as he loses his grip on the people and things around him. But it’s also a moving exploration of how children become caretakers for their parents, with Olivia Colman turning in a standout role as a daughter weighing the hard decision about whether to live her own life or give it up for her dad.

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Zeller weaves in elements of psychological horror and even a mystery component to put his main character (and us) on edge constantly, and while the drama goes to some disturbing places (including incidents of elder abuse), at its core it is very much about love and the power of empathy.

Played by Hopkins, Anthony (yep, that's the on-screen elder gentleman's name, too) is an 80-year-old Londoner living in a posh apartment. He listens to classical music, has a favorite watch that doubles as a security blanket of sorts, yet can’t fend for himself anymore due to his ailing mental health. He also has a tendency to roll through caregivers, having threatened his last one, and Anthony’s daughter Anne (Colman) wants him to meet a new nurse because she’s soon moving to Paris with a new love. “You’re abandoning me. What is going to become of me?” a visibly freaked-out Anthony says.

Soon after she leaves, he’s in the kitchen, hears a door slam and confronts a stranger (Mark Gatiss) sitting and reading a newspaper. This man Paul says he’s Anne’s husband, though this is news to Anthony. The old man suspects that Anne’s “cooking something” against him and wants to move him into a home, and his daughter comes through the door but it’s another woman (Olivia Williams) that he doesn’t recognize.

“The Father” just gets more unnerving from there as Anthony tries to make sense of it all while the film gradually reveals the cracks in his constantly shifting reality, and his personality veers wildly from moment to moment. When Anthony meets his new caregiver Laura (Imogen Poots), whom he thinks resembles his younger daughter Lucy, he flirts and does a little soft shoe yet on a dime turns on her and cruelly mentions that she shares Lucy’s “habit of laughing inanely.”

Hopkins is astounding when navigating all these various states of mind – from righteous anger to withering spitefulness to a child-like vulnerability – that play out as Anthony loses control of his life. Even though the part isn’t conventionally showy, Hopkins gets to touch every bit of the emotional spectrum and the result is as indelible a role as when Hopkins donned Hannibal’s mask and won an Oscar for “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Colman, a couple of years removed from taking best actress for “The Favourite,” is also understatedly superb as a woman dealing with all of this. And it all takes a toll: Paul (sometimes Gatiss, sometimes Rufus Sewell) resents Anthony’s presence and pushes Anne to do something about him, Anne has to smooth things over when Anthony insults his nurse, and most achingly, her father doesn’t even know who she is half the time.

Sneakily utilizing production design and uncanny good editing, “The Father” fascinatingly puts the viewer in the same state of distress as its main character. And in adapting his own play, the director’s carried over an intimate quality of a staged chamber drama to not just show a man dealing with dementia but also offer a way into his mind with a haunting, deeply affecting and quite memorable narrative.

The Father Review

Back in 2000, a filmmaker named Christopher Nolan made his American debut with Memento , an emotionally brutal thriller about a man named Leonard who is unable to retain a memory for more than five minutes. What was startling about it was the way in which Nolan locks the viewer inside Leonard’s mind, so that you too greedily grab on to any morsel of information offered and eye other characters with suspicion. Now, 21 years later, another new director, this time a French playwright named Florian Zeller, is using a similar technique to equally striking effect. The hero of The Father is an octogenarian and has neither peroxide-blond hair nor visible tattoos, but he too is floundering desperately, unable to trust his own mind. And by adopting the perspective of a man with advanced dementia, Zeller has created a highly effective piece of POV filmmaking, a kind of horror film with a huge heart.

Anthony ( Anthony Hopkins ) is lost in a labyrinth. It’s a mental one: the various threads of his life keep slipping through his fingers. Where’s his watch? Is his daughter married? Is she moving to France? What’s happened to his other daughter? Is it morning or evening? Where’s that bloody watch? But as depicted here, it’s also a physical maze: as he negotiates the London flat in which he’s ensconced, the furniture keeps shifting, paintings vanishing from the walls, a piano morphing into a drinks cabinet. Zeller, adapting his own stage play, proves a natural at subverting filmic language to head-spinning effect. It’s unclear at all times exactly where Anthony is, or when he is.

It’s a tough watch, for sure, not least in the astonishing, tear-jerking final five minutes. But it’s also gripping and audacious.

Who he is is kept fuzzy, too. Conversations Anthony has with people lurch forward, frequently reversing when something he says is met with bafflement — “Of course,” he mutters repeatedly when corrected, though it’s heartbreakingly obvious that beneath his feigned comprehension is still abject confusion. Like Leonard in Memento , Anthony is hunting for clues to his own identity. And as portrayed by Hopkins in a powerhouse performance, one of the actor’s very best, he cycles through a vast range of emotion in 97 minutes, none of it feeling false. At one point the character is impishly charming, offering a whisky to his new carer and launching into a frenzied tap-dance. At another, his mood blackens, becoming horribly cruel. But mostly, he is lost, unmoored, searching desperately for a measure of control.

It’s a tough watch, for sure, not least in the astonishing, tear-jerking final five minutes. But it’s also gripping and audacious, twisting the conventions of narrative storytelling to match the awful effects of the disease it’s portraying. It offers no easy answers — there aren’t any. But it does offer plenty of compassion, both for the titular character and for his daughter, occasionally lingering with her, as played with low-key power by Olivia Colman , just long enough to make clear how much she’s struggling too. “I don’t need help from anyone,” Anthony barks at one point. But The Father makes clear that in this situation, all we can do is hang on to each other for dear life.

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The Father Is a Devastating Close-up of a Mind That’s Beginning to Fray

Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) has come unstuck in time. He can never seem to find his watch, and he suspects that someone has taken it — maybe one of the women hired to be his caregivers or the man he encounters in the living room who claims to be married to his daughter. Inevitably, it turns out to be in the bathroom, where he has always hidden his valuables, a habit that’s not nearly as secret as he seems to think it is. Anthony’s desire to enforce order on the day is countered by the way that the hours keep slipping by him; he’ll still be in his pajamas when he finds himself being asked to sit down to dinner. His daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), will tell him things, like that she’s met someone and that she’s going to Paris to be with him. But when he brings the move up later, she has no idea what he’s talking about. More frighteningly, sometimes she looks like another person entirely (and is played by another, Olivia Williams) who still calls him “Dad” and wants to know why he’s looking at her that way. All he can do is mutter about how there’s something funny going on, a comment that does little to capture the scope of his disorientation.

The Father is the directorial debut of French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller, which he adapted from his own play with the help of Christopher Hampton. It’s an intimately scaled drama that manages to be terrifying, unfolding as it does primarily from the unmoored perspective of someone in serious cognitive decline. What’s so nightmarish about Anthony’s situation is that he retains just enough of himself to understand that something is terribly wrong. He runs up against the walls of his own constrained existence, feeling loss and panic and rarely able to pin down why. When the film opens, he’s living alone in the London apartment he bought three decades before, a spacious, handsomely appointed place with fawn-colored walls. He has already chased off the latest caregiver hired by Anne to look after him, insisting that he’s fine, and for a moment, he seems that way. Then he loses track of the conversation. By the next scene, it starts to seem as though maybe this apartment isn’t his; maybe he has moved in with Anne and doesn’t remember.

The Father is assembled like a puzzle box, its chronology curling in on itself in cunning ways. Certain details — a chicken dinner, a divorce, the arrival of a new home aide named Laura (Imogen Poots), a conversation about nursing homes, Paris — keep returning, making it unclear if we’re in the past or present. The constant is heartbreak: As the film moves along, it starts dipping more and more into Anne’s point of view, and it becomes evident that she’s being swallowed whole by her efforts to care for her aging parent. Her father knows that she has a husband, sometimes, while at other times he’s surprised to find a man he doesn’t recognize in the house — one who’s played by Rufus Sewell in certain scenes and Mark Gatiss in others. Anne’s husband is a lot less patient with Anthony than Anne is. It’s possible we already know what happens to this marriage. It’s possible we’re told the ending of the movie in the very first scene, though it doesn’t matter to Anthony, who exists in the moment in the most anxiety-inducing way possible.

Some plays feel airless and constrained when brought to the screen, but the claustrophobia of The Father — which rarely leaves the apartments and, eventually, health-care facilities in which it’s primarily set — works in its favor. These high-ceilinged spaces serve as the backdrop for two astounding and admirably unsentimental performances. Whatever the relationship between Anne and Anthony was like before his dementia, his condition has only made the cracks in their connection more apparent.

As Anne, Colman offers up shattered smiles and extends endless patience while entertaining a dark fantasy of smothering Anthony in his sleep. As Anthony, Hopkins leans into the character’s capacity for cruelty as well as his vulnerability, working himself into a crescendo of outrage or cutting Anne to the quick with accusations of theft or by insisting that her sister — whose absence he laments with the blitheness of someone who has forgotten what happened — was always his favorite. Hopkins, who shows no signs of slowing down at 83, has always been capable of exuding authority and distinction, but as Anthony, he deftly toggles between bluster and vulnerability. Anthony may not have been an especially warm figure in his prime, but Hopkins makes it painfully clear that dementia is stripping him of any dignity. Masterful and agonizing, The Father is a gorgeously crafted film about a doomed arrangement entered into with love, even though it can only end in tragedy.

*This article appears in the March 1, 2021, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

An elderly man sits in a chair and talks to his middle-aged daughter.

In Theaters

February 26, 2021
Anthony Hopkins as Anthony; Olivia Colman as Anne; Mark Gatiss as The Man; Olivia Williams as The Woman; Imogen Poots as Laura; Rufus Sewell as Paul

Home Release Date

May 4, 2021
Florian Zeller

Distributor

Sony Pictures

Movie Review

The mind, like the body, is a creation of dizzying intricacy. Just as we don’t think about how the heart beats or the lungs breathe, neither do we question what our brain tells us is true.

But sometimes, something in the brain breaks. Clogs. Slows. Skips.

If the body goes wrong—the heart, the lungs, the legs, the teeth—we know it. We feel it. We do something about it, because our mind tells us we must. But when the mind goes wrong, it doesn’t look, to us, as if it’s broken. It looks as if the world has.

Anthony knows his world. He knows who he is, what he loves and how he spent his life. His walls are filled with books and records and pictures of the past, evidence of a life well lived. He has two grown daughters—one he barely sees and loves, the other whom he sees all the time and … well, she’s just all right.

Perhaps he’d appreciate Anne more if she wasn’t always around. But she is. It’s as if she’s moved in to his flat, and at an age when she should really be out on her own. She has a husband named Paul, too—or, at least she does part of the time. And then there are the strangers that Anne insists on bringing in: nurses or helpmates or whatever they’re called. As if Anthony needed help. As if he was old and feeble and not perfectly capable of living his life as he always has.

No, these “helpmates” are of little help to Anthony. They’re terrible, in fact—babying him incessantly and, often, stealing things when they believe he’s not looking. He’s been forced to hide his most prized possessions in a cabinet or under the tub.

But the worst of it? The strangers that come in—those who say they’re Anthony’s caregivers. Those who say they’re Paul. Those, even, who come in and pretend to be Anne herself. What sort of trick are they trying to pull? Anthony knows what his own daughter looks like. Why, he can point to her picture right on that—

But where’s the picture? And who painted the wall?

Positive Elements

The Father is a beautifully brutal portrait of dementia and the toll it takes not just on the one suffering from it, but on the aging man’s primary caregiver: his daughter.

Many of us know, too well, how much Alzheimer’s and dementia can take from loved ones. And many know the quiet heroism that comes with caring for someone suffering from the condition.

And, indeed, Anne is quietly heroic here. We see her suffer a great deal from her father’s slights and suspicions. When Anthony tells visitors that Anne is dull and tedious, she forces a smile and tries not to cry. When Anthony has lost one of his prized possessions, Anne does her best to calm her dad and find it for him. She’s always on call and ready to rush to her father’s side if something goes wrong, sacrificing her own freedom and happiness to do so. Sometimes she even sings him to sleep, as a mother would a baby.

But while Anthony can sometimes act monstrous, it’s not his fault. And just as we can see his cruelty, so sometimes we see flashes of kindness and gratitude.

As his mind deteriorates, he loses the capacity to even put on a sweater. When Anne gently helps him put it on, Anthony looks into her eyes in a moment of comprehension and clarity.

“Anne,” he says. “Thanks—for everything.”

Spiritual Elements

Sexual content.

Anthony seems initially smitten with his newest caregiver (a woman named Laura). “I say, you’re gorgeous,” Anthony tells her when he first meets her, and he holds her hand. He then proceeds to dance enthusiastically for Laura’s pleasure, telling her that he used to be a tap dancer. (It is, of course, not true.)

Anne is married, though that marriage ends in divorce somewhere along the way. We learn that she’s met someone else who lives in Paris, and she plans to move there to be with him.

Violent Content

In a scene in which Anne walks in on her sleeping father, she strokes his face gently and lovingly before moving her hands around his neck and squeezing, strangling him. It’s merely a brutal fantasy, though, one the film perhaps implies is shared by other equally weary and worn caregivers.

Paul, fed up with Anthony, slaps the confused, old man in the face several times.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Anthony talks frequently about his other daughter, Lucy, and how much he misses her. He wonders why she doesn’t visit more, but the truth is brutally simple: Lucy died in an accident years before. We see a brief flashback of her in the hospital, badly bruised and in a neck brace.

Crude or Profane Language

Two f-words, one s-word and a handful of uses of both “b–ch” and “t-ts.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Characters drink wine and whiskey. Anthony swallows a glass of the latter in one gulp while extolling the virtues of his other, “favorite” daughter. Paul consumes a great deal of wine during one dinner, which may contribute to an unfortunate confrontation.

We hear quite a bit of talk about Anthony’s medications, and several people encourage him to take those pills.

Other Negative Elements

“I must say, he’s charming,” caregiver Laura tells Anne when she first meets Anthony.

“Yeah, not always,” Anne says with a forced smile.

We see Anthony behave quite cruelly on occasion, especially toward Anne. “She’s not very bright,” he’ll tell someone as Anne looks on. “Not very intelligent. She gets that from her mother.” He accuses Anne of plotting against him and waiting for him to die so she can have his apartment. “I’m going to outlive you,” he bellows, telling caregiver Laura just how “heartless and manipulative” Anne is.

Anne is devastated and embarrassed by Anthony’s outburst, but Laura takes it in stride. “That sort of reaction is quite normal,” she says. But that doesn’t mean Anthony’s abuse is easy for even professionals to stomach. We learn that he’s chased off several—accusing them of stealing from him and being generally mean. And when Laura gently encourages him to take his medication (which she notes is a pretty shade of blue), he snaps at her, telling her not to talk to him as if he’s “retarded.”

As frustrating as this can be for those close to Anthony, it’s not really his fault. Dementia causes mood swings and lowers inhibitions and removes simple social decorum that most of us simply take for granted. And who wouldn’t get irate to see “strangers” traipse in and out of your home, apparently swiping things as they go?

Anthony’s condition causes him to lie on occasion, too; he claims at various points that he was both a dancer and a circus clown when he was younger.

We can lose our possessions, but no one can take away our memories.

So we tell ourselves as we spend time with loved ones and our money on family vacations, squirreling away precious, eternal moments at every turn.

But the cliché, we know, isn’t always true. Our memories can be taken from us. Our intelligence can, too. Our wit. Our very personality. Everything that makes us us can be torn slowly away, like pages in an old book, until all that’s left is the cover. A husk of who we were.

To me, this feels like one of life’s greatest and cruelest challenges, one that can even shake faith. God , we might pray, take from me my wealth, my health, my home … but leave me myself. Let, with my last breath, look into the eyes of those whom I love, and let them know that I love them, too. But for some, God does not grant this prayer. God is good, but His ways can be mysterious and hard.

The Father , of course, is a very sad movie, one that mercilessly marches through the realities of fading by inches. For those who are intimately acquainted with the subtle horrors of Alzheimer’s and dementia, the film might be especially hard.

But it might be welcome, too, for the film comes with its own bleak beauty It carries with it, perhaps, the tang of grief—all the sorrow and sadness and anguish and pain that great loss brings, but moments of strange sunlight in the darkness: Because in the midst of grief, love remains. Love goes on.

I am not myself, Anthony tells us in gesture and deed. But as the movie wears on, an important but comes about. I am not myself, it says, but I am worthy of love still. I care still—and need care. I am not myself, but I am still a beautiful thing—a beloved creation.

The Father features two incredible performances by previous Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. And while it has some bursts of foul language and moments of shocking cruelty, the story is at its core a tender one, albeit sad and painful.

“I feel like I’m losing all my leaves,” Anthony confesses, “the branches in the wind in the rain.”

Even then—in his confusion and pain and helplessness, some truths still remain: The sun sometimes shines. Walks in the garden can still be pleasant. And he’s still cared for. He’s still loved. In his raging, growing darkness, there is still light.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

Latest Reviews

The First Omen

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The First Omen (2024) – Movie Review

Plot summary.

I t’s 1971 in Rome and a cultural revolution has threatened the church’s influence. With that in mind, a young nun in training, Maggie, is invited to help form the next generation. However, what challenges Maggie is the way the old guard. Yes, these nuns laugh, tell stories, smoke, and joke, but they still have cruel habits, like how they isolate a young girl named Carlita.

Maggie takes to Carlita, and defends her whenever possible, but she is warned by a man named Father Brennan about Carlita. He believes there is something sinister about her and asks for help to prove it since he has been excommunicated. Originally, Maggie isn’t trying to help the man, but as she has visions, hears things, and after one tragic event after another, she changes her mind.

Leading to the kind of reveal that may rock her faith and lead to questions about who she is.

Our Rating: Mixed (Divisive)

Good If You Like

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It Showed Nuns Be Normal

For a lot of these horror movies, especially ones focused on the Catholic faith and religious figures, whether cardinals, nuns, or fathers of the church, they are portrayed as sinister or hiding something. In this film, things are a bit different. We see the nuns tell stories of life before taking their vows, making jokes, smoking, laughing, and simply coming off as human beings.

Is there still reasons to fear them and see them as corrupt due to their role in trying to bring forth the antichrist? Yes. But until that point, you sometimes get a “Sister Act” set of nuns.

It Doesn’t Use Its Runtime Well

Are there frightening moments in “The First Omen?” Yes. However, it cannot be discounted; this is a remake for a franchise that struggles to reinvent itself. Even in this film, while it is nice to see Nell Tiger Free of “Servant,” she doesn’t really bring anything new here.

At this point, horror movies featuring Christianity and Catholicism are as played out as vampires and zombies. We need to explore different faiths, like how “ Lullaby ” puts a Jewish spin on things. For having nuns who have dark visions, are tortured, and dealing with a corrupt institution that vies for power, it has been done excessively, and no one seems able to find a new avenue without well-tread streets.

Thus leading you to have the same scenes of something in the corner causing a jump scare, the elder nun who comes off cold, the men of the church who seem distant, except that one who comes off friendly until they need to stand up to their peers. It all feels so recycled, and it is such a shame since the horror genre has been coming up with excellent new stories, yet this has received funding.

On The Fence

How it pursues your investment.

I’m torn regarding how “The First Omen” seeks your interest. It is a horror movie, so naturally, it draws the people who enjoy jump scares. The film is also a remake, so there is this desire to see what it may do with “The Omen,” which isn’t a bad franchise, but it seems unable to finish the story of the church controlling the antichrist or losing control and causing the end of days. We keep heading back to the beginning.

But, similar to the show “ Tracker ,” there is this sense that, because Nell Tiger Free brings some sort of recognition between “Game of Thrones” and “ Servant ,” she can carry the film, and at times, she does.

However, there are only so many times you can see the same character played by a different actress. And as much as you can appreciate Free’s own brand of young naivete that she brings, while making it clear Maggie is by no means a goody two shows, it doesn’t hold up for two hours when she has no consistent screen partner to keep her sharp or a script to keep you engaged when it’s time to develop the story, and not just make you question what is going to be thrown at the lead next.

Background Information

Content Information

Dialog: Cursing
Violence: Dismemberment, Blood, Torture, Self-Harm
Sexual Content: Nudity, Sexual Situations (Implied), Depiction of Abuse
Miscellaneous: Body Horror, Vomiting, Smoking

Character Guide

Character description(s).

As a kid raised in the church, Maggie was a bit troubled and got into it with the nuns a lot. Even now, while she has settled down, she isn’t afraid to speak her truth and not cower, look down, and apologize. But, with hoping to take her vows and be a permanent part of a Rome abbot, she may have to learn how to bite her tongue.

The actor is also known for their role in “ Servant: Season 1 .”

Carlita is a girl who reminds Maggie of herself. She lives in this cycle of being picked on by the nuns, thus being picked on by the other girls in the orphanage, and when she retaliates, she is treated as the bad one.

Father Brennan

Father Brennan knows something is up with the Roman Catholic church. He doesn’t have specific documentation because he has been excommunicated, but he knows enough to believe Carlita will be at the center of their plans.

The actor is also known for their role in “ Lord of Misrule .”

The post The First Omen (2024) – Movie Review first appeared on Wherever I Look and is written by Amari Allah .

Cast & crew

Nicolas Cage, Maxwell Jenkins, and Jaeden Martell in Arcadian (2024)

A father and his twin teenage sons fight to survive in a remote farmhouse at the end of the end of the world. A father and his twin teenage sons fight to survive in a remote farmhouse at the end of the end of the world. A father and his twin teenage sons fight to survive in a remote farmhouse at the end of the end of the world.

Benjamin Brewer
Michael Nilon
Nicolas Cage
Jaeden Martell
Maxwell Jenkins
14 Critic reviews
68 Metascore
1 nomination

Militant Farmer
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Writer Michael Nilon is Nicolas Cage's agent, manager, and producing partner. He previously wrote Braven (2018).

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 32 minutes

More to explore

‘Chicken for Linda!’ Review: A Comedy That Cooks

In this madcap film, a mother’s apology leads to a delightful misadventure that begins with mourning and ends with a father’s favorite recipe.

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In a colorful animated image, a girl painted yellow talks to a woman painted orange. They talk in a kitchen painted blue, purple and green.

By Lisa Kennedy

In the animated French feature “Chicken for Linda!,” directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, a mother accuses her young daughter of stealing a ring of great and mournful value. When the mother, Paulette (voiced by Clotilde Hesme), discovers her error, she promises to do whatever Linda (Mélinée Leclerc) wishes by way of apology. Linda was an infant when her father died, so she asks her culinarily challenged mother to cook her father’s go-to dish: chicken and peppers.

A general strike — Vive la France! — tosses a slapstick wrench into Paulette’s pledge, closing stores and forcing her to secure the chicken by other means. Police officers give slapstick chase. A watermelon truck and its kindly driver enter the fray. Paulette’s older sister, Astrid (Laetitia Dosch) — a yoga teacher who self-medicates with candy — is dragged into the mess. And the children and denizens of the congenial apartment complex observe and participate in the increasingly madcap antics of mother and child.

For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor. “Chicken for Linda!” explores the differences in grief and memory for child and spouse with a touch as wisely light as the movie’s score, by the composer Clément Ducol’s, which lands festive, thrilling, sorrowful notes instrumentally and in songs.

As the indomitable chicken makes break after break for it, and more and more people are involved in its capture, you’d be right to wonder: What about the tray of peppers one of Linda’s friends left cooking in the oven?

Chicken for Linda! Not Rated. In French and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters.

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When Akshay Kumar's sister disclosed how he told his father that he wants to be a 'HERO': 'His marks were very low'

When Akshay Kumar's sister disclosed how he told his father that he wants to be a 'HERO': 'His marks were very low'

About the Author

The TOI Entertainment Desk is a dynamic and dedicated team of journalists, working tirelessly to bring the pulse of the entertainment world straight to the readers of The Times of India. No red carpet goes unrolled, no stage goes dark - our team spans the globe, bringing you the latest scoops and insider insights from Bollywood to Hollywood, and every entertainment hotspot in between. We don't just report; we tell tales of stardom and stories untold. Whether it's the rise of a new sensation or the seasoned journey of an industry veteran, the TOI Entertainment Desk is your front-row seat to the fascinating narratives that shape the entertainment landscape. Beyond the breaking news, we present a celebration of culture. We explore the intersections of entertainment with society, politics, and everyday life. Read More

Visual Stories

From an initial read of the title, I was under the impression that Chicken for Linda! was about a little girl who really wanted a pet chicken. I was wrong. The French animated movie from directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach takes place in modern France and follows a little girl named Linda who really wants to eat chicken. Specifically chicken with peppers. For Linda’s mom, Paulette, who mostly serves up frozen meals and doesn’t really cook at all, making this dish is already a challenge.

And thanks to an ongoing general strike in their town, all the grocery shops are closed, which makes this quest even harder . But Paulette feels really guilty about wrongfully punishing Linda for swiping a treasured ring, so she heads to a farm to buy a live chicken. This begins Linda and Paulette’s daunting quest to kill, cook, and eat this chicken, something neither of them has even fathomed doing before.

It’s much less morbid than it sounds. Actually, it’s unexpectedly funny, while also being a bittersweet reflection on grief and memory.

A man rendered in blue drives a truck, while a little yellow girl, an orange woman, and a turquoise man sit in a row

Linda approaches her mission with bright-eyed determination that softens the hearts of authority figures and convinces an assortment of inexperienced people to take a stab at killing and preparing the chicken. Eventually, we learn just why Linda is fixated on this particular chicken-and-peppers meal: It’s something her late father, who she barely remembers, used to cook.

All the characters in the movie come to life in single-color blocks, rendered with distinct outlines. There’s a lovely tangibility to how they move: The cat operates as one big blob, except when it stretches out its paws. The policeman wriggles his long limbs around a drooping telephone cord. From a distance, the chickens are splashes of color and a curling outline, darting across the screen. Against the painted background, each frame is vibrant and dynamic.

Chicken for Linda! is chock-full of hijinks, with a lot of physical humor and hilarious situations that stem from the absurd nature of the plot. A cop pulls a gun on the chicken, since that’s the only way he knows how to possibly kill it. After stealing the chicken, Linda and her mom leap into the back of a vegetable delivery truck and hide out among crates of watermelons. There are moments when the movie lags, long chase scenes that get a little too abstract, and a handful of musical sequences that feel like they’re from another movie entirely. But even among the shenanigans and the loftier animated sequences, the movie is anchored in Linda and her desire for the coveted meal, her desire to connect with her father.

An animated chicken in the middle of an apartment, a shattered glass window right above it

That family dynamic, the element that gives this otherwise lighthearted movie its weight, isn’t saved for an emotional gut punch at the end of the story, or turned into a nagging reminder constantly brought up by characters. Instead, it’s simply present in the background of the movie, seamlessly woven into every thread as we learn more about Linda, her mother, their relationship to each other, and how they relate to the rest of the characters we meet.

Linda’s grief and her inability to even really register it eventually builds up to a cathartic point, but it isn’t a heavy-handed emotional release. It’s a subtler epiphany, as she gets the chance to remember key details about her father. And through the process of seeking this moment together, Linda and her mother are finally able to connect, and to open up to their community, who all came together to help them try to eat this dang chicken. The movie is the perfect blend of silliness and serious, deep emotion that never becomes overstated, all told in bright, painted colors that deserve to be seen in theaters to experience their full glory.

Chicken for Linda! is out in select theaters starting April 5.

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IMAGES

The Father movie review & film summary (2021)
The Father movie review & film summary (2021)
The Father (2020)
The Father (2020) Movie Review
The Father
The Father (2020)

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Father and Son's Debonair amoy Tito mo Jun jun
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Father and son can't get along😅 #movie #series
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Father Daughter Food Review #reaction

COMMENTS

The Father movie review & film summary (2021)
A watch. A painting. A chicken dinner. A snippet of conversation. These and other everyday pieces of a life take on greater significance and heartbreaking meaning throughout the course of "The Father.". They're at once mundane and unreliable, tactile and elusive within the ever-shifting mind of Anthony Hopkins ' character, an 80-year ...
The Father
Anthony (Academy Award Winner, Anthony Hopkins) is 80, mischievous, living defiantly alone and rejecting the carers that his daughter, Anne (Academy Award and Golden Globe Winner, Olivia Colman ...
The Father review
The Father review - Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film. Hopkins gives a moving, Oscar-winning turn as a man with dementia in a film full of intelligent performances ...
'The Father' review: Anthony Hopkins at his devastating best
Review: 'The Father' showcases Anthony Hopkins at his devastating best. Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in the movie 'The Father.". The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film ...
'The Father' Review: A Capricious Mind
NYT Critic's Pick. Directed by Florian Zeller. Drama. PG-13. 1h 37m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission ...
The Father review
The Father review - Hopkins a wordy Oscar winner. Academy winner Anthony Hopkins tackles the script's verbosity with aplomb but this study of dementia remains somewhat stagey. T his year's ...
Movie Review: 'The Father' : NPR
Movie Review: 'The Father' An elderly pensioner, played by Anthony Hopkins, refuses all assistance, to the distress of his daughter, played by Olivia Colman, in the dementia drama The Father.
The Father
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 9, 2022. Keith Garlington Keith & the Movies. "The Father" is a tough watch. But the bold choices, the emotional honesty, the crisp detailed ...
'The Father': Film Review
Courtesy of Sundance. The best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago, The Father takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it ...
The Father review: Anthony Hopkins' dementia drama is a quiet revelation
The Father. is a quiet revelation: Review. T he Father is hardly the first prestige drama to address dementia — in fact, it's actually the third in this past month alone, after Supernova and the ...
The Father review
The Nest review - Jude Law and Carrie Coon fall apart in eerie 80s drama Read more Based on the acclaimed, award-winning play, The Father starts out as a deceptively simple drama hinged on a ...
'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives a Tour-de ...
Camera: Ben Smithard. Editor: Yorgos Lamprinos. Music: Ludovico Einaudi. With: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots , Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams. Anthony Hopkins gives a ...
'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins' Mind Is Playing Tricks On Him
The Father is thus both a psychological detective story and a stealth haunted-house movie. It's an exceedingly clever and polished piece of filmmaking, and it marks an impressive feature debut for ...
The Father Review
The Father is a devastating masterwork by first-time director Florian Zeller, based on his play Le Père. The film follows an old man with dementia (Anthony Hopkins) and manipulates its editing ...
'The Father' review: Anthony Hopkins shines in haunting dementia drama
Sneakily utilizing production design and uncanny good editing, "The Father" fascinatingly puts the viewer in the same state of distress as its main character. And in adapting his own play, the ...
The Father (2020)
The Father: Directed by Florian Zeller. With Olivia Colman, Anthony Hopkins, Mark Gatiss, Olivia Williams. A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even the fabric of his reality.
The Father Review
by Nick De Semlyen |. Published on 10 06 2021. Original Title: The Father. Back in 2000, a filmmaker named Christopher Nolan made his American debut with Memento, an emotionally brutal thriller ...
The Father Is a Devastating Close-up on Dementia: Review
Starring Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins, "The Father" is the directorial debut of French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller, which he adapted from his own play. ... movie review Feb. 26 ...
The Father (2020)
At different times, I saw in this film my grandparents, my mother-in-law, my wife, my father, my mother, my brother and myself, and all at times in our lives which could never be called happy. It struck very close to home, and I found it brutal. 8/10. Most realistic movie about dementia. deloudelouvain 26 August 2021.
The Father (2020 film)
The Father is a 2020 psychological drama film, directed by Florian Zeller in his directorial debut. He co-wrote the screenplay with fellow playwright Christopher Hampton on the basis of Zeller's 2012 play Le Père.A French-British co-production, the film stars Anthony Hopkins as an octogenarian Welsh man living with dementia. Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, and Olivia ...
The Father Movie Review
What you will—and won't—find in this movie. Character remarks on another being "gorgeous." Parents need to know that The Father is an excellent -- but at times upsetting -- drama about a man suffering with Alzheimer's. Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman star as father and daughter, Anthony and Anne, with Anthony being diagnosed ...
The Father
The Father, of course, is a very sad movie, one that mercilessly marches through the realities of fading by inches. The Father, of course, is a very sad movie, one that mercilessly marches through the realities of fading by inches. ... Movie Review. The mind, like the body, is a creation of dizzying intricacy. Just as we don't think about how ...
The Father Movie Review: Florian Zeller's Brilliant Tale of Ageing
The horrors of ageing, dementia and the effect it has on caregivers is brilliantly depicted by Zeller, who has based The Father on his own play La Pere and has co-written it along with Christopher ...
The First Omen (2024)
Highlights It Showed Nuns Be Normal. For a lot of these horror movies, especially ones focused on the Catholic faith and religious figures, whether cardinals, nuns, or fathers of the church, they ...
Arcadian (2024)
Arcadian: Directed by Benjamin Brewer. With Nicolas Cage, Jaeden Martell, Maxwell Jenkins, Sadie Soverall. A father and his twin teenage sons fight to survive in a remote farmhouse at the end of the end of the world.
'Mary & George' review: Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine mix sex
Sporting a gleefully descriptive promo line in "Lust. For Power," "Mary & George" joins "Dangerous Liaisons" as a costume drama where sex serves as a weapon of war.
'Chicken for Linda!' Review: A Comedy That Cooks
Review: A Comedy That Cooks In this madcap film, a mother's apology leads to a delightful misadventure that begins with mourning and ends with a father's favorite recipe.
When Akshay Kumar's sister disclosed how he told his father that he
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Vijay Deverakonda's latest movie 'The Family Star' has been released on Friday. The movie has Mrunal Thakur playing the female lead with Jagapathi Babu, Vasuki, Abhinaya, Vennela Kishore and ...
The animated movie Chicken for Linda! needs a big screen
This French movie is about a girl who wants to kill and eat a chicken — and process her grief for her father. GKIDS' latest hits select theaters on April 5. Small stakes, big heart, can't lose

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Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 27, 2020. Running time: 97 MIN.

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Criterion Celebrates the Films That Forever Shifted Our Perception of Kristen Stewart