‘The Father’ is Anthony Hopkins’ greatest performance in decades — Sundance review

The Father puts you in the shoes of a man (Anthony Hopkins) suffering from dementia as he tries to figure out what his reality truly is

While Sundance has had a mixed track record in recent years as a platform to launch an Oscar contender, I have almost no doubt in my mind that Anthony Hopkins will receive a Best Actor nomination for his performance as the eponymous father Anthony in playwright Florian Zeller’s directorial debut The Father, which played in the Premieres section at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It’s a rarity for an actor as esteemed as Hopkins to get another career-defining performance this late, but there’s no other way to describe it other than a tour-de-force and perhaps his greatest role to date. 

Adapting from his own play Le Père, Zeller tells the story of Anthony (Hopkins), an elderly man who recently moved in with his daughter Anne (Oscar winner and overall lovely human Olivia Colman). For much of the beginning of the movie, it seems like a pretty standard dra…