Bayflicks.net

Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman both turn in brilliant performances (what else do you expect) as siblings coping with a father losing himself into dementia. Not that they feel much love towards this father (Philip Bosco), whose parenting skills were apparently only slightly better than those of their absent mother, but they do feel responsibility. Writer/director Tamara Jenkins, in her first feature since 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills, avoids sentimentality, tragedy, or easy lessons, being content to show us a difficult moment in every family, made all the more worse in a dysfunctional one.