Anthony Hopkins‘ performance as an elderly fellow suffering from dementia is the most reasonable and non-alienating performance in this realm. The reason is that we aren’t invited to feel pity for the poor guy as much as understanding, because the movie lives in his head. That’s what’s so striking about Florian Zeller’s film, which has been streaming since 12.20.20 — it invites you in.

Anthony Hopkins to Jodie Foster on his award-calibre performance in The Father: “It was a great script, a great roadmap, and I’m old anyway. It doesn’t have to be hard work. It was easy. And I’d seen my own father going through it 40 years before, and that was in me.”

I’ve seen half of Kevin McDonald‘s The Mauritanian, in which Foster portrays a brilliant, quietly tenacious attorney trying to obtain freedom for the real-life Mohamedou Ould Salahi (Tahar Rahim), who’d been imprisoned in GITMO for quite some time without any charges filed and based solely on what U.S. officials had regarded as suspicious alliances. It’s obviously a good and respectable film, but I wanted to watch all of it before reviewing. (I watched it late one night in mid December and wound up crashing in a sitting position.) It’s based on Salahi’s “Guantanano Diary“.