2/5/2021
Olivia Cooke and Jack O Connell play a couple confronting a memory-destroying pandemic in Chad Hartigan s drama.
A sad, gorgeous film about love amid a pandemic, Chad Hartigan s
Little Fish features not our real disease (it was in the can before COVID-19) but an invented one in which healthy people lose chunks of their identities bit by bit or all at once. Think Alzheimer s, but a more aggressive and unpredictable affliction, and one that hits a shocking percentage of the world s population. Crucially for this story, it strikes the young as well as the old, so a couple who are barely past their wedding day (Olivia Cooke and Jack O Connell) can have their beautiful lives torn apart by it in slow motion. Based on a short story by Aja Gabel, it makes a global crisis intensely personal, even romantic.
Ed Helms and Patti Harrison in Together Together
Prolonged labor, short delivery.
TWITTER
4/23/2021
Ed Helms stars as a single man in his 40s who hires a young gestational surrogate, played by Patti Harrison, to fulfill his urge for fatherhood in Nikole Beckwith s comedy about mutable connections.
One of the standout debuts of 2020 was Jeremy Hersh s
The Surrogate, a superbly acted ethical drama that digs deep into complex interpersonal, psychological, moral and legal questions arising from a third-party reproduction arrangement that takes unforeseen turns. Close friendship added further complications to the childbirth pact in that case, whereas in Nikole Beckwith s
Together Together, the pregnancy agreement is purely transactional. The featherweight comedy is also far more generic, nudging around the shifting boundaries between Ed Helms father-to-be and Patti Harrison s paid surrogate without ever really raising the emotional stakes.