The SunBreak

I Care A Lot (2021 | USA | 118 minutes | J Blakeson)

Netflix has its share of great (or aspiring to be great) cinema — e.g., Roma, The Irishman, maybe even Mank — but as nice as it is that they indulge the occasional auteur with commercially questionable projects, their great gift to the world may be the Good Enough Netflix Movie. Light yet engaging, well-paced, an amount of star power, maybe a bit of an edge, and a grab bag of genres that shift every half hour to comfortably disappear two hours of quality time on your couch. J. Blakeson’s I Care A Lot falls into the latter category: it opens as a dark comedy about swindling old people, morphs a few times into a mystery, a heist, and a violent revenge thriller, before coming full circle. But throughout the ever-shifting tone, it remains a constant showcase for Rosamund Pike.

There is much to reflect on with the film Nomadland. It is perhaps the most critically praised film of the year, the Seattle Film Critics Society named it their best film of the year this week, and for good reason. It is a beautifully constructed work by writer and director Chloé Zhao who adapted it from the 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by journalist Jessica Bruder. After Zhao’s last film, 2017’s The Rider, it was hard to imagine her creating another film on par with that one.

Yet Zhao has done just that and more.