The film seamlessly blends genuine fear with overwhelming sadness.

| Sep 4, 2021

[Anthony Hopkins] is absolutely remarkable here. I read the screenplay, available online, out of curiosity, and what he brings to the words on the page is beyond and beyond and beyond. Hopkins has played King Lear (twice) but this is his real King Lear.

| Jul 29, 2021

The way Zeller and his production designer Peter Francis orchestrate these changes are almost imperceptible, but nevertheless disorienting and utterly crucial to the narrative.

| Jul 29, 2021

Without resorting to exploitative, amped-up mystery or obfuscation, Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton have fashioned a sort of gaslight thriller in which the mind is both predator and prey.

| Jul 2, 2021

The Father distorts and disorients in keeping with its protagonist's increasingly confused view of the world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2021

It's a film that disquiets on a cellular level.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 14, 2021

Huge plaudits are due to production designer Peter Francis, whose subtly reconfigured sets disorient the viewer, matching Anthony's increasingly bewildered experience.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 13, 2021

The Father could well be the first film to truly convey what it must feel like to be falling into the grips of dementia and is as heartbreaking as it is brilliantly innovative in a narrative sense.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 11, 2021

Hopkins is extraordinary as a man flailing against a condition that's taking everything from him. And Zeller proves he's a natural filmmaker, orchestrating a Wagnerian opera of emotion based entirely around an old man in a flat.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 10, 2021

It's deeply moving, important work, whether or not it was ever destined to win awards.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 10, 2021

It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 10, 2021

In its howls of mortal distress, Florian Zeller's film is as hypnotically ugly as a Francis Bacon mouth, as doom-drenched as one of Larkin's late laments.

| Jun 9, 2021

The sense of control is essential. The film is such a scramble it would unravel without it. Still. All Zeller's brilliance would be for naught without Hopkins.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 9, 2021

Haunting and credible, powered by some unshakable performances.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 9, 2021

In Florian Zeller's elegiac The Father, Hopkins gives one of the strongest performances in his storied career, playing a character grappling with his own mortality...

| Apr 19, 2021

As a man helplessly disappearing, Anthony Hopkins is magnificently present.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 16, 2021

Childlike vulnerability hasn't been something Hopkins has opened up to show us in a long, long while, but he seems ready for this role, hungry to do it, and you may not be prepared for how deep he goes.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 12, 2021

There is no weak link in The Father.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 11, 2021

[The Father] leans too strongly into the horror tropes, to the point where it seems the film is less about truly understanding the experience of a dementia patient and more about messing with the audience.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 9, 2021

Deeply sympathetic but never patronising, The Father is a gentle-handed yet powerful film that forces us through Hopkins's extraordinary performance to have an albeit fleeting window into what living with dementia could be like.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 7, 2021