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‘a man called otto’ review: tom hanks in a predictable but touching portrait of grief and resilience.

The Oscar winner plays the title role in this remake of the hit Swedish film about a curmudgeonly widower learning to embrace life again.

By Frank Scheck

Frank Scheck

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A Man Called Otto Reviews

A Man Called Otto is not a waste of time by any stretch, but it also does not demand your attention in any strong measure.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Feb 28, 2024

I did occasionally find it just a bit too pat and too contrived to melt my more critical lens entirely, but it won me over with its nicely handled comedic touches, lovely performances, and both its clear-eyed positivity and its shamelessly huge heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 31, 2023

If not for Tom Hanks, "A Man Called Otto" might be a boring tale of one grumpy man's perseverance against the elements trying to take him down. But it's because of Hanks that the film succeeds.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The drama movie is touching but never truly remarkable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Despite having a somewhat interesting start with the presence of Hanks as the unfriendly neighbor, it is a remake that loses the desired dramatic effect by sometimes going down the route of calculated poignancy. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 19, 2023

Tom Hanks was an absolute blast to watch on screen, and his interaction with his co-stars were some of my favorite scenes in the movie. He commanded the screen with his betrayal of Otto.

Full Review | Apr 29, 2023

It proves again, the everyman of the movies, can play any mood or soul. The movie is patient, and a special shoutout to Mariana Trevino for taking a slightly underwritten role and giving it depth.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Apr 27, 2023

Subtle, sincerely redemptive comedic drama...Tom Hanks delivers a carefully modulated, understated performance, as does his 'real-life' son Truman, but the script tends to be overly melodramatic.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 6, 2023

The director is Marc Forster of Monster's Ball. For sure, his saccharine movie is not hard to like, if only because he is a pro at manipulating heartstrings and Hanks cannot help but be affable, however ill-suited for his role here.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 23, 2023

Tom Hanks gets in touch with his inner Larry David as the curmudgeonly sexegenarian at the heart of Marc Forster’s lukewarm English-language remake of Hannes Holm’s Oscar-nominated “A Man Called Ova.”

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Mar 13, 2023

With Hanks as its star, Marc Forster’s safe Hollywood remake is all the more predictable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 2, 2023

A Man Called Otto is mechanically engineered for maximum lachrymosal extraction.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2023

Tom Hanks is trying to channel his inner Clint Eastwood for this US adaptation of Fredrik Bachman’s Swedish best-seller - the problem is, he simply isn’t grouchy enough

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 26, 2023

A film that gets by thanks to Hanks' unwavering watchability though there's not a beat or a revelation we haven't seen before and taking its biggest emotional cue directly from She's Having a Baby is an annoyingly misguided choice.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 16, 2023

This slice of superior schmaltz has Tom Hanks as a fastidious late-middle-aged grump who hates everyone, from overcharging shop assistants to neighbours who put their recycling in the wrong bin.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 15, 2023

Tom Hanks does his best to look mean, but his inherent affability never fails to shine through. Otto discovers to his disgust that there is no avoiding mushiness.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2023

With a terrific supporting cast – Mariana Trevino is the MVP of this journey, and she’s a force of nature as the kind neighbor Marisol. Without her as a counterpart, this would be a difficult, one-note story.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Feb 3, 2023

It’s the kind of schmaltzy, big performance studio drama that used to get a billion Oscar nominations, and darn it, I kind of miss those being in vogue.

Full Review | Feb 2, 2023

A sweet story of the power of community to bring someone back from the brink of suicide. A film like this depends on the performances - and here there are some weak links and some standout performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 1, 2023

A predictable tear-jerker made no less enjoyable or heartfelt by its predictability.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2023

A Man Called Otto Review

Tom hanks gets old and cranky in a heart-wrenching tale of loss and aging..

A Man Called Otto hits U.S. theaters on Jan. 13, 2023.

There’s no getting around it; Otto (Tom Hanks) is old. We first meet him at a local DIY store attempting to buy some rope, with hilariously cranky results. Imagine a curmudgeonly, elderly man refusing to get with the times and taking it out on everyone around him. A Man Called Otto is exactly that… at least, at first. But you’ll soon find that it’s actually a film that explores the bleak existence of an elderly man who’s stuck in limbo – a life after life where he’s lost his place in the world. Thankfully, it’s not too long before he finds a new one. While it’s a perfectly heart-wrenching set-up, it doesn’t bring much else to the table, leaning on old tropes and a simple plot to tell a just-okay story about Hanks’ old grouch.

When the Mendes family moves in across the street, Marisol (Mariana Treviño), her husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and their two daughters throw Otto’s life into disarray. They’re the annoyingly perky neighbors who always want to borrow a wrench or need help with a window. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what happens next, as director Marc Forster uses just about every cliché in the book to hammer home Otto’s changing outlook on life.

But let’s back up for a moment. In between tubs of cookies and requests for babysitting, we learn that Otto is desperately sad. He lost his wife, Sonya (Rachel Keller), less than a year ago, and he’s a shadow of the man he once was, who we learn about through a liberal helping of flashbacks. In some ways, it’s easy to compare A Man Called Otto to one of Hanks’ more famous films – it’s basically the anti-Forrest Gump.

Otto is definitely on the opposite end of the happiness spectrum, but it’s more than that. A Man Called Otto highlights all the greatest hits of Otto’s life, but it starts at the opposite end of a life lived. Through flashbacks, we learn why Otto is the way he is, as well as find out more about the love of his life… and exactly why she meant so much to him.

What's Tom Hanks' best movie?

The trouble is, there’s just nothing truly unique going on here. That’s not to say A Man Called Otto isn’t a decent enough film – it tugs at the heartstrings in all the right places, and you’ll be hard-pressed to walk out of the theater with dry eyes by the end. But it’s not exactly full of twists and turns; quite the opposite. The final act is telegraphed from a million miles away, and it all feels perhaps a bit too familiar.

Based on the New York Times best-seller, A Man Called Otto does everything you expect… but little else. Forster does his best to inject some life into proceedings in the form of some curiously eccentric neighbors. Unfortunately, the rather twee elements of finding a new family and the excruciatingly labored metaphors laced liberally throughout distract from any originality you might find. There are even scenes of the literal changing of the seasons, to add to some of the not-so-subtle metaphors. Yeah.

Thankfully, Hanks is in typically good form as Otto, lending an air of gravitas to what could be a startlingly pedestrian role. Instead, Hanks walks a fine line between loveable grouch and eccentric geriatric, with plenty of his trademark heart thrown in for good measure. A debut performance from his son, Truman Hanks, is less impressive. Not that there’s anything wrong with his acting, but Truman suffers from having little to work with – much of his role revolves around cooing over the love of young Otto’s life, making doe-eyes at the pretty girl and following her, unerringly, wherever she may go. Not exactly an actor’s wildest dream.

Still, he proves himself to be adequate, at least… and with some stirring performances from Otto’s neighbors, the cast carries this decidedly unremarkable story on its capable shoulders. Throw in some truly funny moments in its unexpectedly witty script, and there’s just enough to make the film worth watching.

The Best Movie of 2022

A Man Called Otto is ultimately a formulaic comedy-drama that leans far too much on tried and tested cliches. A charismatic central performance from Hanks elevates the movie, albeit slightly, with standout performances from Mariana Treviño and Cameron Britton. A tight script punctuates Otto’s misery with some truly memorable comic moments, and Forster wrangles the potentially miserable tale into something far more uplifting. A Man Called Otto is often gut-wrenching and sometimes even charming, but it just fails to bring much new to the table. If you can enjoy it for what it is, you’ll be rewarded with a sweet tale of an old man losing his place in the world only to find an entirely new one.

A Man Called Otto is a benign comedy-drama that peppers a heart-wrenching story with plenty of eye-rolling jokes to distract you from its perfectly pedestrian plot. A tear-jerking performance from Tom Hanks shows a certain subtlety you won’t find in its storyline, while Hanks’ son Truman fills in the gaps with some adequate flashbacks in a reverse-Forrest Gump. You’ll struggle to escape from the theater with dry eyes, but director Marc Forster leans on familiar tropes and cliches to amp up the feels – and it might not work on everyone. A Man Called Otto is good enough to pass a quiet holiday weekend, but it fails to bring much else to the table.

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It says something about the current state of studio filmmaking in Hollywood that all the things that make “A Man Called Otto” stand out are things that really should make it commonplace. The film is made with a level of craft and simple competence that has become shockingly rare. A genuine movie star is allowed to radiate charisma and charm, and all the performances have character nuance and emotional depth.

These should be the basic building blocks of Hollywood moviemaking and yet here we are, with “A Man Called Otto” feeling special for being a winsome dramedy with some effective moments of tearjerking tenderness. It’s not so much a matter of they don’t make them like this anymore as they should be making them like this all the time.

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Directed by Marc Forster, the film is based on the 2012 novel “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman, which became an international bestseller and previously was adapted into a 2016 Swedish film that earned two Oscar nominations. From a screenplay by David Magee, who this year also wrote the adapted screenplays for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “The School for Good and Evil,” the new film finds enough ways to update the core material to keep it fresh.

As the film opens, Otto (Tom Hanks) is buying a few bits and pieces at a hardware store and then gets into an argument with a clerk about whether he is being overcharged by a few cents for a length of rope. Once he is back at his modest, meticulously kept row house, it is revealed that Otto plans to kill himself, but life keeps getting in the way.

There are his new neighbors, Marisol and Tommy (Mariana Treviño and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a young couple with two small children and expecting another. The trans kid who delivers the newspapers was a student of Otto’s deceased wife, a teacher. Otto also finds himself reconnecting with a pair of longtime neighbors with whom he had a falling-out. Even a self-styled “social media journalist” won’t leave him alone after Otto, who had intended to throw himself onto the tracks, saves a man from being struck by a train.

A man and two children look skeptically at a colorfully dressed clown.

Otto seems at first to be a rigid, stuck-in-his-ways old man similar to the type Clint Eastwood has played recently in films such as “Gran Torino,” “The Mule” and “Cry Macho,” men who must learn to overcome their prejudices. Otto, largely because of circumstances revealed around his late wife (played in flashbacks by Rachel Keller), is more readily open-minded and open-hearted than those Eastwood characters. He is nevertheless endlessly aggravated by others for a perceived lack of knowledge or abilities.

The film is an odd companion to Hanks’ recent, more willfully weird turn as Colonel Tom Parker in “Elvis,” which found him working against an accent and prosthetics and a fanciful villainous characterization. His role in “Otto” plays to Hanks’ more obvious strengths, his essential affability even when he is presenting a gruff, unyielding exterior. The sweet heart of the character is never too far below the surface.

“A Man Called Otto” is also something of a family affair, with Rita Wilson, Hanks’ wife, as one of the producers and co-writing and performing the song “Til You’re Home.” In flashback scenes, young Otto is played by one of Hanks’ and Wilson’s children, Truman Hanks. And in one of the film’s slyer jokes, the hip-hop song “White Boy Summer” by their son Chet Hanks is used to personify a certain kind of clueless obliviousness in others.

The real standout in the supporting cast is Treviño, a comedy star in her native Mexico who brings real energy and feeling to her role as one of Otto’s new neighbors. She barges into Otto’s orderly life and brings a bit of chaos with her, inserting a much-needed liveliness into the movie as well. Mike Birbiglia is also well cast playing against type as a sleazy real estate developer.

It is not meant as faint praise to say that “A Man Called Otto” is nice. The film has an easygoing, please-like-me quality that somehow never comes off as desperate but instead gives it a reassuring quality, like a mug of warm tea. It’s borderline corny, but sometimes corny can mean unselfconscious, willing to be unguarded in its sincerity. The tender message of hopefulness and spiritual renewal is a welcome tonic as the year comes to a close.

'A Man Called Otto'

Rated: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving suicide attempts, and language. Running time: 2 hours, 6 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 30, AMC the Grove, Los Angeles; AMC Century City

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Tom Hanks holding a cat and looking a bit grumpy

A Man Called Otto review – formulaic but charming grumpy old man movie

Tom Hanks’s cranky widower may tread well-worn ground, but the neighbourly kindness that saves him is life-affirming

A Hollywood remake of the glumly life-affirming 2015 Swedish box-office hit A Man Called Ove , which was itself based on a bestselling novel, A Man Called Otto taps into a seemingly unquenchable audience appetite for stories of cantankerous grumps redeemed by the healing embrace of community. The picture stars an uncharacteristically abrasive Tom Hanks as Otto, a short-fused widower who crankily micromanages everything in his street, and also his own multiple suicide attempts. The arrival of new neighbours – heavily pregnant Marisol (Mariana Treviño), her useless husband and their kids – interrupts Otto’s plans to rejoin his recently departed wife.

If there’s one thing even more attractive than the sweet embrace of death, it’s the opportunity to demonstrate the correct way of doing stuff. Everything from parallel parking to dishwasher maintenance falls under Otto’s self-appointed remit. It’s formulaic stuff that makes heavy weather of its flashbacks (Hanks’s son Truman struggles as the younger Otto). But just as Otto is worn down by the warmth and generosity of Marisol, so all but the most dogged of sceptics will be charmed by the message of the redemptive power of small acts of kindness and plastic containers full of tamales.

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‘A Man Called Otto’ Review: Tom Hanks Plays a Florid Grump

Hanks is well-cast as a misanthropic loner, but the film lacks the courage of his caustic conviction.

By Owen Gleiberman

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(l to r) Luna (Christiana Montoya), Abbie (Alessandra Perez), and Otto (Tom Hanks) are entertained by a clown as they wait in Columbia Pictures A MAN CALLED OTTO. Photo by: Niko Tavernise

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Hanks harumphs with an irresistible self-justifying logic, and the clueless response on the part of the store’s millennial clerks, who are doing all they can to accommodate his tantrum, is the icing on the high-dudgeon cake. The secret weapon of a scene like this one is that even though Otto is overreacting like a jerk, in his petty and snappish way he’s sort of right. It should bother people, a little bit, that a corporation designs it so you can’t just buy five feet of rope.

But David Magee, who wrote the script of “A Man Called Otto” (inspired by the 2015 Swedish film “A Man Called Ove”), and Marc Forster, who directed it, don’t have anything that witty in mind. The film starts off rooted in the real world but turns into a soft-headed “redemptive” fairy tale. Everything gets turned up a notch; even the potentially uproarious scene of Otto dishing out abuse to a hospital clown withers in the clown’s telegraphed overreaction. The movie is trying so hard to be a crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It’s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than.

Otto, in case you were wondering, plans to use that five feet of rope to kill himself. He’s still reeling from the recent death of his wife, and he intends to hang himself in his living room (from a hole he punches into the ceiling — a doomed plan or what?). I’ve never been crazy about botched-suicide comedy, going back to the prelude sequence of “Harold and Maude” (sorry, not a fan of that calculated cult ’70s quirkfest). The reason isn’t that I think it’s so scandalous but that it’s actually, under the surface, quite sentimental. The joke is always the same: that the suicides fail because the person… really wants to live . In this case, the idea that Hanks’ Otto has given up on life is a conceit the audience scarcely pretends to buy.

Otto occupies a condo in the same soothing blue prefab row-house development he has lived in ever since he married Sonya (Rachel Keller), the true love he first spotted on a Philadelphia train platform — she dropped her book! He picked it up and ran after her! All the way to the other side of the platform! — when he was a young man.

The film is threaded with flashbacks to their relationship, and they’re built on the potentially effective stunt casting of Truman Hanks, Hanks’s 27-year-old son, as the younger Otto, who came to Philly to enlist in the military, which turned into a doomed mission. Hanks’ acerbic actor son Colin has often seemed a chip off the old block, but Truman Hanks comes off as notably sweeter, softer, and more benign than his dad. In almost any movie you’d have to squint to buy him as the young Tom Hanks, but in this movie, where we have to believe that this angelic nerd evolves into a sharp-tongued malcontent, it’s far too jarring a leap.

In case all those don’t get to you, the movie makes a point of throwing in a transgender former student of Sonya’s, who’s there to demonstrate that Otto may grouse at the world but that he sees it entirely without prejudice. He’s a hater with a heart of gold. “A Man Called Otto” wants to lift our spirits, but the trouble with it is that the nicer Otto gets, the more naggingly fake the movie becomes. It should have been called “Florid-est Grump.”

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, Dec. 16, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 126 MIN.

Production: A Sony Pictures Entertainment release of a Columbia Pictures, Stage 6 Films, SF Productions, Play-Tone production. Producers: Fredrik Wikström Nicastro, Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman. Executive producers: Marc Forster, Renée Wolfe, Louise Rosner, David Magee, Michael Porseryd, Tim King, Sudie Smyth, Steven Shareshian, Celia Costas, Neda Backman, Tor Jonasson.
Crew: Director: Marc Forster. Screenplay: David Magee. Camera: Mathuas Koenigswieser. Editor: Matt Chessé. Music: Thomas Newman.
With: Tom Hanks, Mariana Treviño, Rachel Keller, Truman Hanks, Mike Birbiglia, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo.

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A Man Called Otto Review

A Man Called Otto

The 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove — adapted from the novel of the same name by Fredrik Backman — is a very Scandinavian brand of feelgoodery: one which sees its hero regularly try to kill himself. It became a huge hit in its native country, beloved for its flinty anti-hero and morbid sense of humour, and remains the third biggest film of all time at the Swedish box office. Hollywood, inevitably, came calling soon after.

Like many English-language remakes, A Man Called Otto doesn’t totally justify its existence — you can’t help but wonder, when films are so easily available online, why not just point audiences to the original? But it does at least pull off a significant casting coup, in the form of Tom Hanks .

Tom Hanks is so good that the film suffers somewhat when he's not on screen.

Last seen this grouchy when announcing there was no crying in baseball, Hanks is clearly relishing playing against type here, abandoning his “America’s Dad” persona to step into Otto’s short-fused slippers. It’s a typically excellent lead performance, misanthropic yet good-hearted, Hanks finding and elevating the humanity in the character. (He is particularly adept at smiling without ever losing his frown.)

He’s so good, in fact, that the film suffers somewhat when he’s not on screen. It’s undoubtedly a lovely touch to cast Hanks’ real-life son Truman as the younger Otto in repeated flashbacks, fleshing out his early life and marriage to Sonya (Rachel Keller), but those scenes are by far the weakest, treacly and overly rose-tinted, and have an adverse effect on the film’s pace. It’s a constant tonal plate-spinning act, balancing the comic elements with the repeated scenes of attempted suicide, and despite its sharper edges, director Marc Forster doesn’t quite avoid sugary clichés.

What keeps it consistently likeable, Hanks aside, are the actors surrounding him. There’s a great role for Juanita Jennings as one of Otto’s estranged neighbours, and a surprisingly moving subplot about a trans teen in Otto’s life, played by trans actor Mack Bayda. Best among the ensemble is Mexican actor Mariana Treviño as Marisol, the mother of a new family living across the street from Otto; her vivacity and genial zest for life gives a supposedly grouchy film its warm heart. The It’s-A-Wonderful-Life -y message that eventually comes — that no man is a failure who has friends — is ultimately hard to snub.

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A Man Called Otto review: Tom Hanks anchors a sweet drama

“A Man Called Otto is a straightforward drama that often veers too far into sentimentality but is nonetheless frequently saved by Tom Hanks' reliably charming lead performance.”

Tom Hanks' moving lead performance
Mariana Treviño's breakout supporting performance
The film's surprisingly deadpan sense of humor
Several superfluous, overly sweet flashbacks
A few poorly-placed needle drops
An inconsistent tone

A Man Called Otto is the kind of straightforward, inoffensive dramedy that used to be incredibly common. Nowadays, Hollywood seems less and less interested in producing movies like A Man Called Otto , though, even during the end-of-the-year holiday season that has always seemed well-suited for middling-budget, family-friendly dramas like it. That fact doesn’t make A Man Called Otto a particularly unique or boundary-pushing film. It does, however, make it feel like a relic from a different time.

That’s OK, because Otto, as played here by Tom Hanks , is a bit of a relic himself. Not only is Hanks’ likable curmudgeon one of the oldest residents of his Midwest neighborhood when A Man Called Otto begins, but he’s also desperate to shuffle off this mortal coil as quickly and efficiently as he can. Of course, Otto isn’t nearly as stone cold as he makes himself out to be, nor is his desire to die as unwavering as he claims. His path from embittered pessimist to renewed optimist is clear from the moment A Man Called Otto begins, and the film itself doesn’t have too much to offer in terms of ingenuity or originality.

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The film is, in fact, exactly what any reasonably well-versed moviegoer may expect it to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s without its charms.

A Man Called Otto is the second film adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s 2012 novel, A Man Called Ove , which was previously adapted as a Swedish-language movie in 2015. Both Backman’s original novel and director Hannes Holm’s 2015 adaptation tell virtually the same story as A Man Called Otto . The new film follows Hanks’ grumpy older man as his attempts to end his life are repeatedly interrupted by the sudden arrival of his newest neighbors, Marisol (a scene-stealing Mariana Treviño) and Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), as well as their two plucky young daughters.

It isn’t long before both Marisol and Tommy have inserted themselves into Otto’s life. In doing so, they open the door for Otto’s past to be explored via a series of often saccharine flashbacks that offer glimpses into Otto’s marriage to Sonya (Rachel Keller), who died just a few months prior to Marisol and Tommy’s arrival. Sonya’s death, combined with his forced retirement, briefly but understandably render Otto uninterested in life. Fortunately, his unexpected friendship with Marisol gives Otto’s previously sweet self the chance to reemerge.

The film’s story is not, by any means, a particularly original one. Marc Forster’s direction and David Magee’s open-hearted screenplay don’t go out of their way to inject many new surprises or instances of structural invention into A Man Called Otto , either. Instead, the film is perfectly content to rely solely on the dramatic strength of its undeniably simple story and the performances given by its cast members.

Thankfully, Forster’s instincts aren’t totally off base in A Man Called Otto , a film that has, among other things, Tom Hanks going for it. As Otto, Hanks alternates between cartoonishly grumpy and understatedly sorrowful with the kind of precision that only a performer as experienced as him could muster. Throughout the film, Forster effectively juxtaposes Hanks’ seasoned, unassuming presence with the live-wire energy conjured by his scene-stealing co-star, Treviño. Together, Treviño and Hanks make for an infectiously likable duo.

The two stars’ chemistry is so good that A Man Called Otto is often at its best whenever it’s focusing on Marisol and Otto’s growing friendship. Otto’s relationships with several of his other neighbors, including the endlessly joyful Jimmy (Cameron Britton), provide the film with moments of effective humor and heart as well. However, while Hanks’ real-life son, Truman, makes for a believable version of Otto’s younger self, the flashbacks involving him and Keller’s Sonya are often so one-note that they add little except extra minutes to A Man Called Otto ’s runtime.

In addition to the film’s superfluous flashbacks, Forster makes a handful of creative mistakes throughout A Man Called Otto , including one badly timed needle drop. Magee’s script also invests little time in setting up or exploring Mike Birbiglia’s unnamed real estate agent, who just so happens to be the closest thing the film has to an antagonist. Altogether, these decisions lead the film toward a strangely lackluster climax. The film itself also runs about 10 or 15 minutes longer than it should, which similarly takes some of the weight away from A Man Called Otto ’s otherwise bittersweet final moments.

For all of its faults, though, A Man Called Otto still succeeds solely on the power of Hanks and Treviño’s performances. The film is not, by any means, as cohesive or emotionally stirring as many of its team members’ previous efforts, but it’s a harmless and charming affair nonetheless. Ultimately, that’s just another way of saying that A Man Called Otto really is just like the family-friendly, end-of-the-year dramas that Hollywood used to annually put out, the best of which could be relied upon to supply enough laughs and heartwarming moments to justify their holiday-timed releases. A Man Called Otto , for its part, does just that.

A Man Called Otto is playing in theaters now.

Editors' Recommendations

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Review: A grumpy Tom Hanks stars in ‘A Man Called Otto’

This image released by Sony Pictures shows Tom Hanks in a scene from “A Man Called Otto.” (Niko Tavernise/Sony Pictures via AP)

This image released by Sony Pictures shows Tom Hanks, left, in a scene from “A Man Called Otto.” (Niko Tavernise/Sony Pictures via AP)

This image released by Sony Pictures shows Tom Hanks, right, and Mariana Treviño in a scene from “A Man Called Otto.” (Niko Tavernise/Sony Pictures via AP)

This image released by Sony Pictures shows Tom Hanks, left, and Mariana Treviño in a scene from “A Man Called Otto.” (Dennis Mong/Sony Pictures via AP)

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Sentimental tales about grumpy old men and American decline have, until recently, typically been the domain of Clint Eastwood.

But in “A Man Called Otto,” Marc Forster’s adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s bestseller and a remake of the 2016 Swedish film “A Man Called Ove,” it’s Tom Hanks prowling the neighborhood and irritably grumbling about how things used to be. In the original, Rolf Lassgård richly inhabited the role of Ove, a curmudgeonly widower — a Forrest Grump —whose suicide attempts are foiled by needy neighbors and, ultimately, his grudging, sincere devotion to them.

Exasperation, whether directed at a crying ballplayer or a slobbering canine, has always been squarely in Hanks’ wheelhouse. But despondency or even plain get-off-my-lawn orneriness are less obvious traits possessed by the actor sometimes called “America’s Dad.” Following Hanks’ villainous turn as Col. Tom Parker in “Elvis,” the 66-year-old has found in “A Man Called Otto” another role that interestingly, if not always entirely successfully, caters to his strengths while tweaking his familiar screen presence.

It also may rob “A Man Called Otto,” which opens with Otto buying rope to hang himself with, of some of its spirit. We know there are dark roads that Hanks just isn’t going to go down, and some of the early, more caustic scenes of Forster’s film strike a false note. But as “A Man Called Otto” makes its way through Otto’s life, cutting between his present-day squabbles and flashbacks of happier times with his wife, Sonya (Rachel Keller), Hanks movingly tailors the role to himself. How “A Man Called Otto” unfolds won’t surprise anyone, but it does the trick for a little post-holidays heart-warming.

This image released by Warner Bros. Discovery shows Phanxine in a scene from the HBO television mini series "The Sympathizer." (Hopper Stone/Warner Bros. Discovery via AP

“A Man Called Otto” is set in the prefab row-house development Otto has long lived in, where he tirelessly tisk-tisks any rule breakers, re-sorts misplaced recycling and berates drivers who violate the street’s regulation against through traffic.

Screenwriter David Magee (“Life of Pi,” “Finding Neverland”) hues closely to the Swedish film as a kind of parable of community. Up and down the street are all the people the freshly retired Otto barely tolerates: friends-turned-enemies (Peter Lawson Jones, Juanita Jennings), a friendly exerciser (a delightful Cameron Britton), a transgender paper deliverer and former student of Otto’s wife (Mack Bayda). Most of all there is Marisol (a terrific Mariana Treviño), a pregnant mother of two has just moved in with her husband (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). Various needs — a stray cat, a borrowed ladder, driving lessons — intrude on Otto’s desires for a peaceful death and, in between aborted suicide attempts, gradually rekindle his will to live.

It’s sometimes too broadly drawn. Mike Birbiglia plays a predatory real estate agent from a company not-so-subtly called Dye & Merica. (“Sounds like Dying America, which it is,” says Otto.) But “A Man Called Otto” is less after realism than it is a modern-day fable, with shades of Scrooge and the Grinch. As a tale of a solitary man, Hanks has made it a poignant work of family. Rita Wilson, his wife, is a producer and is heard singing a song in the film. The younger Otto is played in flashbacks by their son, Truman Hanks. Even Chet Hanks’ “White Boy Summer” blares from a car radio.

Another tune, though, is a more thrilling needle drop. The less said probably the better, but suffice to say, it could be a sign that the Kate Bush renaissance so hearteningly kicked up by “Stranger Things” has not yet abated. If that’s not life-affirming, I don’t know what is.

“A Man Called Otto,” a Sony Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for mature thematic material involving suicide attempts, and language. Running time: 126 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

Review: 'A Man Called Otto' follows an obvious plot that can be seen from outer space

Tom Hanks saves the film from being a total loss.

Tom Hanks is one of our best actors, a gentleman star in the classic tradition of Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper. It's affection for the 66-year-old legend that helps ease the sugar shock of "A Man Called Otto," a theaters-only crowdpleaser that merely wants to entertain.

There's no crime in that. But this risk-free, rigorously conventional adaptation of the Swedish bestseller and Oscar-nominated 2015 foreign-language film, "A Man Called Otto," follows the broad strokes of a glaringly obvious plot that can be seen from outer space.

Hanks plays Otto Anderson, a grumpy old man who's been depressed to the point of attempting suicide since the death of his beloved wife. Hanks has played the dark side before, most recently in a fat suit and prosthetics as Elvis Presley's malevolent manager Col. Tom Parker in "Elvis."

PHOTO: Jimmy, played by Cameron Britton, jogs by Otto, played by Tom Hanks, in Columbia Pictures' "A Man Called Otto."

But critics and audiences tend to prefer Hanks in gentler mode, such as his Oscar-nominated turn as children's TV host Mr. Rogers in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." Not to worry, Otto is cranky all right, but his ill will is mostly on the comic surface.

"Idiot," is the word Otto, a retired engineer, throws around to insult everyone else living in his Pittsburgh neighborhood, especially those who don't recycle, don't know how to parallel park and don't get out of his way when he swan dives onto train tracks.

Hostile Otto grunts his disdain for the world at large. He doesn't turn Scrooge and mumble "Bah-humbug," but that's probably because it isn't Christmas yet. Poor Otto can't even enter a hardware store to buy 5 feet of rope -- he wants to hang himself -- without suffering pricing pushback from a clueless, millennial clerk.

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Flashbacks show us what a sweetie Otto was as a young man, played by Truman Hanks, the star's son, as he meets and falls hard for the literate and lovely Sonya (Rachel Keller), a teacher whose kindness gives his life meaning until an accident, hers, throws their lives out of balance.

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The director is the German-born Marc Forster, who made the worst James Bond movie ever in 2008's "Quantum of Solace," but showed an admirable edge in such films as "Monster's Ball" and "World War Z." That sharpness is totally MIA in the Otto story.

PHOTO: Tom Hanks is Otto Anderson in Columbia Pictures' "A Man Called Otto."

The catalyst for Otto's change of heart is his pregnant new neighbor Marisol (a swell Mariana Treviño), who's moved in with her husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and their two young daughters. Otto thinks Tommy is an idiot, but Marisol earns his grudging respect.

As for Otto's bias against immigrants, it's skin deep like Clint Eastwood's in "Gran Torino." Otto sees in Marisol the spark he so loved in his late wife. Soon he's giving this overworked mom driving lessons and eating her Mexican home cooking. And did I mention that Otto takes in a stray cat. He does. Shameless.

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A rubbed-raw drama this is not. Things get worse when Otto befriends a former student of his wife who is transgender. It's not like Otto is getting woke -- he was always woke on the inside.

With a lesser actor than Hanks, the movie would suck you down into sentimental quicksand. Even with Hanks, the gooey stuff is hard to hold back. But if all you're looking for in a movie during these stressful times is harmless fluff, then "A Man Called Otto" delivers the goods.

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A man called otto, common sense media reviewers.

Neighborly love warms comedy about suicidal curmudgeon.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

While movie deals with suicidal ideation and suici

Marisol, an immigrant and mother, is persistent, c

Positive characters who are diverse in terms of ag

Several suicide attempts (hanging, carbon monoxide

A married couple's love story is told from beginni

Strong language includes "bastard," "crap," "godda

Recurring joke about men who identify with certain

Positive Messages

While movie deals with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, ultimate message is that life has more to offer than we may think -- we just need to hang in there and be open to what it brings us. Cranky people likely have a painful reason behind their rude behavior. Themes of love, loss, compassion, finding family in unexpected places.

Positive Role Models

Marisol, an immigrant and mother, is persistent, caring, unapologetically herself. Neighbors, co-workers, and people Otto comes into contact with are remarkably patient and cheery despite his rude behavior.

Diverse Representations

Positive characters who are diverse in terms of age, gender, race, disability, and economics. Focus on issues related to aging, including forced retirement, loss, and health problems. Title character, director, and writer are all White men, but a Latino family is the heart of the film; the matriarch is a Mexican immigrant (played by Mexican actor Mariana Treviño) who frequently speaks in unsubtitled Spanish. Significant supporting characters with disabilities. Transgender character shares his struggle with family acceptance.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Several suicide attempts (hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, shooting, train) that fail in ways that are depicted as humorous; ultimately, the character comes to understand that life has much to offer him, and he has much to offer others. Vehicular accident with bodies strewn about; strong emotional consequences. Hostile but humorous behavior from main character toward small animals. Peril when a person falls onto railroad tracks. Road rage incident: driver pulled out of vehicle.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A married couple's love story is told from beginning to end in flashbacks. Kissing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes "bastard," "crap," "goddamn," "pr--ks," "s--t," "son of a bitch," "suck," and "what the hell." Cranky character calls people "idiots" and calls the neighborhood stray "stupid cat."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Recurring joke about men who identify with certain car brands, so vehicles are highlighted with close-ups on the ornament or logo.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Tom Hanks produced and stars in A Man Called Otto, an ultimately life-affirming dramedy that deals frankly with suicidal ideation. Adapted from Fredrik Backman's bestselling book and the Academy Award-nominated 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove , it centers on a man named Otto (Hanks), the epitome of the cranky "get off my lawn" type, who wants to end his life as a matter of efficiency. The movie presents a series of humorously interrupted attempts at his death via suicide (using a rope, asphyxiation, a gun, etc.), all of which lead to the point at which Otto realizes that, while his wife and career are gone, life can still be fulfilling. The movie encourages giving others grace, since you may not be aware of what they're going through. The residents in Otto's housing complex are diverse in terms of age, gender, race, economics, disability, and health, and they're the definition of "neighborly." Otto is counterbalanced by Marisol ( Mariana Treviño ), a positively portrayed Mexican immigrant mother of two who moves in across the street. In addition to Otto's attempts at ending his life, there's a road rage incident. Otto is impatient with others and calls them "idiots," "bastards," and "pr--ks." Other language includes "s--t" and "goddamn." Characters kiss. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

Parents say (24)
Kids say (23)

Based on 24 parent reviews

Multiple Realistic and Long-Form Depictions of Suicide

Could be triggering to those with mental illness, what's the story.

Tom Hanks is A MAN CALLED OTTO, the neighborhood crank who has no tolerance for those who don't follow the rules. After retiring and the loss of his wife, Otto feels he has nothing else to live for. But his pesky neighbors keep interrupting his attempts to end his life.

Is It Any Good?

With this remarkably warm and fulfilling film, Hanks and director Marc Forster pull off the impossible: making a family-friendly suicide comedy. Even though the 2015 Swedish original starring Rolf Lassgård was quite successful, after watching A Man Called Otto , it feels impossible to picture anyone else in the starring role. Hanks' grumpy old man trumps all of those who came before him: Clint Eastwood , Walter Matthau , Jack Lemmon , etc. He's so beloved that every rude thing he says is likely to make you laugh, and Forster smartly balances the crankiness by surrounding Otto with warmhearted souls who return his barbs with a knowing look and a smile: Yep, that's Otto! They don't take his mean streak to heart, and it allows viewers to go on the journey and care about him.

While we might understand that Otto "is something special," he's also the dark to the light that is Marisol (Mariana Treviño), the very pregnant woman who moves across the street from Otto. She's a flutter of radiant energy that just refuses to be pushed aside by Otto's hostility. And she's just one strong example of positive diverse representation in the film. The residents in Otto's townhouse complex represent "community" in every sense of the word: They're a family in their own unique way, with residents from all stages and walks of life who look out for each other in good times and bad. While Otto's suicide attempts do make the film too mature for younger children, it's a strong choice for movie night with teens and grandparents.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how A Man Called Otto plays on viewers' compassion . How can we practice patience for those who exhibit bitter behavior while also not indulging unacceptable treatment?

How does the movie portray depression and suicidal ideation? What should you do if you're worried about a friend or family member? What resources are available to help both kids and adults ? (If you or someone you love is in crisis, you can contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.)

Even though Otto is impatient and unkind, did you find yourself rooting for him? What skills does Hanks use to make Otto likable and vulnerable?

Talk about the diversity represented in Otto's neighborhood. Does this accurately reflect real life? Why is positive representation in the media important?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 30, 2022
On DVD or streaming : February 28, 2023
Cast : Tom Hanks , Mariana Treviño , Manuel Garcia-Rulfo
Director : Marc Forster
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors
Studio : Columbia Pictures
Genre : Comedy
Topics : Book Characters
Character Strengths : Compassion
Run time : 126 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : mature thematic material involving suicide attempts, and language
Last updated : November 20, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'living' and 'a man called otto'.

Bob Mondello

Two new films about men who find flexibility late in life, "Living" and "A Man Called Otto," are remakes of acclaimed foreign films: Director Akira Kurosawa's "Ikuru" and Sweden's "A Man Called Ove."

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Two cranky old men, two celebrated foreign films, and just in time for Christmas, two remakes starring Bill Nighy and Tom Hanks. Critic Bob Mondello says the films "Living" and "A Man Called Otto" both revolve around a character type we all recognize that this time of year. Dickens called him Scrooge.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: We meet Otto, played by Tom Hanks, in a hardware store.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A MAN CALLED OTTO")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) The total is 3.47.

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) You charged me for 6 feet of rope.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Oh, yes. It's $0.99 a yard.

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) I didn't get 2 yards. I got 5 feet.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) We don't charge by the foot. We charge by the yard.

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) Ninety-nine cents a yard is 33...

MONDELLO: If you take a man's measure by how he treats others...

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) You charged me $1.98.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You're good at math.

MONDELLO: ...Otto comes up short.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) I know, but I can't put it into the computer the way that you just said.

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) What the hell kind of computer can't do simple math?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) I got some change. Let me cover that extra $0.33 for you.

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) Sir, I do not want your 33 cents.

MONDELLO: He's not any friendlier with new neighbors, even when they come bearing gifts.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I brought you some food.

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) Why?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) We wanted to properly introduce ourselves because, you know, we're going to be neighbors, I think, so...

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) OK.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) OK.

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) Bye.

MONDELLO: But her foot is in the door.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Are you always this unfriendly?

TOM HANKS: (As Otto) I'm not unfriendly.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Oh, OK, you're not. Every word you say is like a warm cuddle.

MONDELLO: There is a reason Otto's a curmudgeon. The recent passing of his wife has left his days empty, so he growls and argues to give himself reasons to go on. Not breaking new ground "In A Man Called Otto," it just wants to be a crowd pleaser, though there are nice variations on the Scandinavian original, "A Man Called Ove" - neighbors who are Black, Hispanic and trans, for instance. Tom Hanks is just the guy to make grumpiness appealing, and with his son Truman Hanks playing the character in flashbacks...

TRUMAN HANKS: (As Otto) Miss, you dropped your book.

MONDELLO: Director Marc Forster has ensured that sentiment will drive "A Man Called Otto," no matter how prickly its hero. Sentiment is far too showy an emotion for the buttoned-up hero of "Living" - ramrod straight, tailored in bowler hat and pinstripe suit. Bill Nighy is Mr. Williams, a widower toiling in a public works office in post-World War II London. His days heading a staff of six are unvarying and entirely pointless.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LIVING")

BILL NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) Mr. Rusbridger, why has this D19 come back to us?

HUBERT BURTON: (As Mr. Rusbridger) Mr. Wright (ph) at planning was of the view that a remittance certificate should be attached to it.

NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) The remittance certificate can only be issued after the D19 is authorized.

BURTON: (As Mr. Rusbridger) Yes. I tried to tell Mr. Wright that, Mr. Williams, but he simply won't have it.

NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) Then we can keep it here for now.

MONDELLO: He inserts it in the middle of a stack of papers.

NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) It'll do no harm.

MONDELLO: Tasked with shuttling skyscrapers of papers and the people who bring them from department to department...

NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) Please show the ladies in, Mr. Singh. Mr. Middleton, your turn.

MONDELLO: Mr. Williams might continue this roundelay forever were he not confronted with a medical diagnosis. Six months, maybe nine, says his doctor.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) It's never easy, this.

NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) Quite.

MONDELLO: Mr. Williams, reacting as anyone might, heads for the seashore, determined to - he's not sure what, as he tells a louche writer he meets there.

NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) I withdrew this cash and came down here to enjoy myself, but I realized I don't know how.

MONDELLO: Happily, the writer has a few ideas. Still, momentary pleasures are momentary. And when Mr. Williams returns to London, he seeks a more lasting purpose to his time remaining - a reference letter to help a young woman in his office, say. And what about those ladies who've been petitioning his department for months?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) They even sought to offer us a bench to sit on. That's how long we was there.

MONDELLO: Might he actually make the playground they want a reality without, you know, raising his voice or violating rules of decorum?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Leave it with us. We'll send it down to you once it's ready.

NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) Actually, I was hoping you might see to it now, and I could take it off your hands straight away.

MONDELLO: South African director Oliver Hermanus, working from a script by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote "Remains Of The Day," makes "Living" an elegant retelling of Kurosawa's "Ikiru," "To Live." It's brimming with period detail and delicate performances, none more heartbreaking than Nighy's Mr. Williams, who would likely be appalled by Tom Hanks' "Man Called Otto" but who comes to a remarkably similar end slowly, to his own surprise, and almost too late - finding purpose in living. I'm Bob Mondello.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Man Called Otto’ on Netflix, Starring Tom Hanks as a Stereotypical Grumpy Old Man

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A Man Called Otto

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A Man Called Otto (now on Netflix, in addition to streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video ) continues the current run of Minor Tom Hanks performances, which began a few years back with throwback maritime war thriller Greyhound and continued through the Western News of the World , the disarmingly Chappie -esque Finch , his annoying OTT turn in Elvis and that damned Pinocchio “live action” remake. Otto – which grossed north of $100 million at the worldwide box office – finds him playing a character you non-subtitle-averse people may be familiar with, since the film is an Americanized remake of 2015 Swedish dark comedy A Man Called Ove , about a persnickety grump of a lonely old man whose repeated attempts to off himself routinely fail. What Hanks, a true treasure of the cinema, does with the role is… well, more disappointing than anything else.

A MAN CALLED OTTO : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Otto (Hanks) can’t BELIEVE he has to pay for two yards of rope to hang himself with when he only needs five feet. And don’t get him STARTED on the shoddy craftsmanship of the eye hook he drills into his ceiling – it won’t even bear the weight of an adult human long enough for one to properly asphyxiate one’s self with a noose. Oh well. Since Otto’s not dead, he may as well go on with his usual routine of nitpicking every little rule and ordinance of his condo complex, you know, your bike goes here and not here , who the hell keeps putting metal in the recycling bin for plastic, who keeps leaving the gate open and, while we’re at it, let’s not be nice to the affectionate stray cat that wanders the neighborhood. “Idiots” is a thing he grumbles under his breath constantly. He’s just been unwillingly “retired” from the job he’s had for a zillion years – his co-workers seem to relish driving a knife into the photo of his face rendered as frosting atop his goodbye cake – and he lays in bed next to a conspicuous empty spot that tells us HEY THE POOR A-HOLE’S WIFE IS DEAD SO MAYBE CUT HIM A LITTLE SLACK. Even though cutting anyone slack has apparently never crossed his mind. When he goes low, we go high, right?

There’s no slack in that noose rope, though. He’s about to do himself in when there arises such a clatter from across the road. It’s his new neighbors moving in, and they can’t park the damn U-Haul trailer: Idiots. He parks it for them because if you want anything done right you have to do it yourself and everyone is stupid but Otto and he does not suffer fools, which is the rest of the population, because he’s the only one on the whole dadgum planet who’s not a fool. The new neighbors are led by Marisol (Mariana Treviño), a happy-go-lucky mom of two girls with another baby on the way and a dope of a husband (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) who can’t do anything without breaking something, including his own bones. These people could really use a friend who knows how to do things, but jeez, Otto’s level of pragmatism is a bit, shall we say, unnecessary .

Otto visits his wife’s grave and flashes back to when he met Sonya (Rachel Keller), an angel of a human being who was utterly flawless, or perhaps not, because one wonders if her ability to nurture the type of bellyaching grousemonkey that Otto becomes was, indeed, a flaw. (Notably, Hanks’ son Truman Hanks plays young Otto.) Marisol gives Otto some delicious food, and starts chipping away at his crusty veneer. She needs driving lessons, and if anyone who isn’t a grade-A moron is going to teach her, the only option is Otto, who might actually have a feeling or two under there that he’ll actually almost share. Meanwhile, he babysits her girls, starts getting on a little better with his other wacky neighbors – even some of the less-wacky ones – and maybe that ol’ cat ain’t so bad after all. Also meanwhile, we get a subplot about an evil real estate company that feels completely extraneous, but hey, at least Otto has something else to gripe about.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Otto is Carl Fredricksen from Up crossed with Napoleon Dynamite (“Idiots!”) crossed with Ebenezer Scrooge, and Marisol is similar to Sally Hawkins’ Poppy character from Happy-Go-Lucky , because she’s pretty much unflappable, and also doesn’t know how to drive.

Performance Worth Watching: We walked away from Otto thinking we probably don’t need to see Hanks play another softball character like this (he’s kind of the anti-Mr. Rogers), and also thinking we need to see Treviño – who lights up the screen with her presence – in many more things.

Memorable Dialogue: Otto finds it somewhere in himself to say this to Marisol: “You have given birth to two children. Soon it’ll be three. You have come here from a country very far away. You learned a new language, you got yourself an education and a nitwit husband and you are holding that family together. You will have no problem learning how to drive. My god, the world is full of complete idiots who have managed to figure it out, and you are not a complete idiot.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: A Man Called Otto is mechanically engineered for maximum lachrymosal extraction. The grouch meets the pollyanna, and something has to give, and this is the type of movie that you know which way it’s going to swing, probably even before you watch it. The reason Otto is the way he is? Well, no spoilers, but it’s pat and predictable, and leads to an aggravating, ballpeen-to-the-noggin ironic twist, and a washy, noncommittal resolution. More troublesome is how the movie treats suicide as a plot device, either to rouse a dark-comic chuckle from us or to make us feel sorry for Otto; it’s simplistic, bordering on distasteful. It didn’t sit well with me, in spite of director Marc Forster’s attempt to gauge the tone so it’s bland and easy to consume.

Treviño works hard to be the film’s saving grace, but I’m not sure it’s worth saving. As for the Otto character, it seems tailored to plug into the Hanks algorithm so he may execute the commands of a schmaltz-ridden screenplay that’s overburdened with subplots and characters, and rather jejune in its approach to sensitive emotional content. Which isn’t to say Hanks is bad; seeing him inhabit a cartoon like Otto can be entertaining, and he enjoys the occasional exchange with Treviño that strikes a chord of truth. But when the writing is this flimsy, it forces even a stalwart superstar actor into playing little more than a caricature.

Our Call: SKIP IT. A Man Called Otto is watchable at best, tone deaf at worst.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the old oak.

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Eighty-seven-year-old filmmaker Ken Loach's "The Old Oak" is about how changing demographics in a struggling English town called Durham manifest in a crumbling old pub, the last public space that everyone claims as their own. This is Loach's latest and (according to Loach) final motion picture, and it feels like a summation. It's as engrossing, thoughtful, heartfelt, angry, hopeful, and altogether valuable as his best work. If it is indeed Loach's farewell, it's one hell of a fine note to go out on.

There are almost always scenes in Loach's films where a group of locals gathers in a shared space to argue about issues that affect all of them. The space here is the bar of the title, owned and operated by TJ Ballantyne ( Dave Turner ). TJ assists a local charity spearheaded by Laura ( Claire Rodgerson ) that gives donated furniture and other household items to Syrian war refugees. TJ is a goodhearted and tough but depressed man who lost his wife and son many years ago and dotes on his little dog. He has grown increasingly disenchanted with his core group of patrons, a bunch of men his age who blame immigrants for a decline in living standards that predates the newcomers' arrival by decades. There's even a gallery of photos in a shuttered back room of the bar commemorating local labor struggles back when TJ was a teenager and Durham was still built around coal mining.

The film begins, like many Loach movies, by dropping you into the middle of a conflict. A group of Syrians have arrived in town by bus and are being harassed by white locals (some of whom apparently aren't even from the neighborhood; hate tourists, basically). One of the new arrivals is teenaged Yara ( Ebla Mari ), a budding photojournalist who shoots the old-fashioned way, on 35mm film. She documents her family's arrival, including their harassment by the xenophobes telling them to go back to a war zone that's already shattered their spirits (Yara's father is missing and presumed dead). One of the bullies steals Yara's camera and turns it on the newcomers and then, when confronted, gleefully drops it on the pavement, breaking it.

This sparks the beginning of Yara's relationship with TJ, which forms the backbone of "The Old Oak" and unites the different story strands—and the fractured community as well. TJ invites Yara into the back room of his bar, which hasn't been used in decades due to plumbing and electrical problems, and offers her a replacement 35mm camera from a collection that once belonged to his late uncle, who took photos of the town's mining heyday that hang framed on the walls. The film takes its sweet time perusing those pictures and even lets TJ give Yara a tour through time and space as they look at them. We get the sense of the weight of the past (always a factor in Loach's movies, whether the past is nostalgically fantasized and false or based on something real, which is the case here) and also of the mercurial present. Thus begins a believable and quietly powerful story consisting of simply written and blocked scenes that explore the dynamics of the town.

Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty (a legend in his own right, though a comparatively unsung one) do their usual thing, which is write characters who are representative of certain "types" but feel like real people and have specific concerns or issues, then set them all loose, letting them do what they'd do if they existed, even if it means that they step on each other's feet or angrily smash against each other. One of the many remarkable things about "The Old Oak" is how it allows us to see and feel everyone's point of view, including the perspectives of characters who are mainly looking for human targets to direct their formless frustrations at, and are wrong on the merits.

Exhibit A is the locals who blame immigrants for a gradual economic decline that's the fault of ruthless corporations and the post-Thatcher government, not immigrants. A couple of important early scenes feature one of the bar regulars, Charlie ( Trevor Fox ), grousing that local homes are being bought up cheaply by faceless foreign corporations that are looking to rent them or turn them into Air B&Bs, and that don't even have the basic courtesy to send a human into the town to look at the properties they're vacuuming up. Meanwhile, he and his wife scramble to pay the upkeep on their own home. They are trapped, economically unable to either stay put or sell. You get why Charlie would be furious and, in his zeal for scapegoats, would cast a wide net that pulls in not just the newcomers but the people trying to make their resettlement less painful.

It's unreasonable on its face that anyone should be mad at TJ and Laura for bringing donated items to war refugees (they exemplify Christian values far more than the xenophobes and racists who mock newcomers for being brown and Muslim and joke about them being terrorists). But you can also see how the white citizens of Durham would resent their own kind helping newcomers while they themselves struggle through a life that's not as dire as what the refugees are dealing with but is still nothing to joke about.

An especially piercing moment sees Yara escort a local white teenager back to her house after she collapses during an athletic event due to lack of food; Tara then goes into the girl's family's kitchen to find her something to eat and learns that the cupboard and fridge are almost bare. In an earlier scene, TJ and Laura give a little Syrian girl a bike while three local boys look on. TJ explains that it's an old bike that was donated, but that doesn't make an impression on the boys, one of whom states that he also wants a bike. Nobody in this scene is wrong. There's just a lot that needs to be worked out, and the factors contributing to the the conflict are beyond the scope or understanding of any one person in the scene.

Loach and Laverty have a clearly defined hierarchy of values that applies to all of their collaborations. They're socialists who believe in a collective community and government responsibility to care and uplift. They define that responsibility against the narcissistic ruthlessness of capitalism and the governments it has corrupted and captured, and tie it back to an increasingly marginalized and mocked sense of what Christian values are supposed to be about.

It's relevant to the story that Durham was once organized around the local church, which was revered not just for its religious function but for the way the buildings themselves were physically connected to the community through the workers who built the place. The church is still operational but is an abstraction to most of the characters, including TJ, who hasn't set foot inside it for many years. The decline of the church (which of course had its own problems) explains why The Old Oak has become such a valuable and fought-over meeting spot.

The movie named for the bar has a spiritual dimension that was often downplayed in early Loach works. This is expressed not just through arguments and monologues about the moral responsibility to help the less fortunate, but through scenes of characters getting together and doing something helpful, whether it’s bringing a mattress to a newly arrived family or staging a potluck dinner that will introduce the refugees to the locals. This reaching-out process builds new relationships that represent the economic safety net that was destroyed. But it can’t replace it, because individuals don't have the power of governments.

Loach has always told stories that use real locations and some nonprofessional actors, encourage improvisation, and take their stories from contemporary or historical events that affect the everyday lives of working and/or struggling individuals. These are not the kinds of films where billionaires fly to Norway on a private jet to plot a corporate takeover, nor are there genre movie elements (horror, science fiction, film noir, etc). The camerawork (overseen here by Robbie Ryan ) focuses on capturing moments of interaction between individuals and groups of people rather than making statements on its own. The aesthetic is as rigorous in its way as any that you see in work by filmmakers who are more ostentatiously formalist in their approach.

There are echoes of social realist or "kitchen sink realist" playwrights like John Osborne ("A Look Back in Anger") and Arthur Miller ("All My Sons," "Death of a Salesman") in the scenes delving into TJ and Sora's friendship, the pain of their pasts, and the quiet tragedy of their stories and those of all the other characters going largely unnoticed by the wider world. Several of them echo one of the signature speeches in "Death of a Salesman," by Linda, talking about her salesman husband Willy: "Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person." This is an entire movie filled with Willy Lomans, some more likable than others, all worthy of attention.

The entire exercise often plays like a documentary record of actual events for which a camera happened to be present. You truly feel as if you're getting a slice of life. Often in Loach's films it's a bitter slice. That's not the case with "The Old Oak," a drama that has many troubling or devastating moments but barrels through them, and lets the characters emerge with shreds of hope for a better future.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The Old Oak (2024)

113 minutes

Dave Turner as TJ Ballantyne

Ebla Mari as Yara

Claire Rodgerson as Laura

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RETRO REVIEW: Spider-Man 2 Is an Unlikely Candidate for the Best Superhero Film of All Time

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 is seen by many as the best superhero movie ever made but, by all conventional wisdom, it should've been a disaster.

By all conventional wisdom, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 should have been a disaster. Instead, it's one of the best superhero films of all time. While the Spider-Man trilogy's first chapter is wonderful, its immediate sequel took everything that worked from it and did it better. While slightly less financially successful than the films on either side of it, Spider-Man 2 is perhaps the finest effort to come from this creative team . However, nailing down the story almost doomed it.

After Spider-Man's success, Sony and Raimi quickly inked a deal to produce the sequel. The first film was, effectively, a proof-of-concept. Knowing that the adventures of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and his wall-crawling alter ego worked on the big screen imbued the sequel with a new creative energy. Before filming began, however, five writers struggled to crack a worthy follow-up. Smallville's Alfred Gough and Miles Millar were the first two to tackle the script. David Koepp later joined the team, then they were all replaced by novelist Michael Chabon. Finally, Alvin Sargent, working with Raimi, cobbled together the Spider-Man 2 script from their favorite bits of the previous film.

Spider-Man 2's story should've been a mess. Instead, it was a complementary continuation of the previous film that also boasted one of the superhero genre's most compelling villains and interesting conflicts . Alfred Molina as Otto Octavius was an inspired casting choice, and the effects team responsible for turning him into Doctor Octopus (aka Doc Ock) outdid themselves. But most importantly for Spider-Man, the sequel made it clear why he was one of the greatest superheroes to ever exist.

Spider-Man 2 Can Best Be Summarized by the Runaway Train

The train rescue scene is far more than a quotable meme, retro review: spider-man (2002) set the standard for superhero films.

Sometimes, superhero films struggle to showcase why their central character is a hero. All too often, the filmmakers resort to clichés like having the hero stop a bank robbery or saving a pedestrian from a speeding vehicle. Spider-Man 2 found refreshing ways to make these kinds of predictable staples work. It did so by adding some fun twists to these obligatory moments, and by focusing more on Spider-Man saving people than fighting supervillains. After all, Spidey is at his most heroic in this film when he saves people.

For example, Peter was at his most grounded and relatable when he failed to deliver pizza on time because he saved a pair of kids crossing the street. Later, when Peter tried (and failed) to attend Mary Jane Watson's (Kirsten Dunst) play on time, audiences never learned what the getaway car full of criminals did to get into that police chase. All they saw was Spider-Man stopping some people who almost ran down poor Peter Parker, and saved a crowd of onlookers from a flipped-over police car. He wasn't chasing a deadly killer or reacting to a supervillain. He just did what the friendly-neighborhood Spider-Man did best: save people no one else could've helped.

That said, Spider-Man 2's most iconic take on this trope was the sequence where he stopped the runaway train . The train rescue was Spider-Man 2's high point. This wasn't just because there was a logic to why Doctor Octopus put the train's passengers in danger, or the fact that the scene was immortalized as an often misquoted meme. The rescue itself is a thrilling sequence, but the real payoff came at its end.

The simple shot of the passengers' hands catching Spider-Man before he fell wraooed up audiences' hearts like Doc Ock's tentacles . The bystander's quote about Spidey being "...just a kid, no older than my son" plus the actual kids who promised Peter that they "...won't tell nobody" about his real identity hit all the right notes . It was pure comic book storytelling and a profoundly human moment. That it was punctuated by Doc Ock taking Spider-Man prisoner makes it all the better.

Doctor Octopus Was Just as Good at Being Bad as the Green Goblin

Willem dafoe's normal osborn was gold, but molina's otto octavius was a truly sympathetic antagonist, sam raimi's spider-man trilogy star addresses big plans for lizard in canceled sequel.

Willem Dafoe's turn as Norman Osborn in Spider-Man was a tough act to follow, yet Alfred Molina did it masterfully. Otto Octavius is a truly different villain, even if his powers made by science gone awry also corrupted his mind. That said, the Goblin's evil felt like it was always present in Norman. He just needed an excuse to unleash it. Otto, conversely, was a genuinely sweet and good man driven over the edge by the trauma from his accident and losing his wife . And like in the previous movie, the villain died at the end. But this time, Doc Ock's death was a redemptive sacrifice rather than hubris.

While Molina's performance didn't go as big as Dafoe, he still made Doc Ock a genuine threat. He also had the added challenge of acting with a rig of giant prosthetic tentacles, save for scenes in which they were computer-generated. Where Dafoe got to throw punches and use his entire body in his performance, Molina had to sell the same level of menace with just his shoulders or, at most, his torso . Still, every scene where Doc Ock used his tentacles was frighteningly believable. The tentacles never felt like computer creations or puppets. In fact, they almost became characters in their own right.

Aiding Octavius's fall to the dark side was Harry Osborn's (James Franco) own heel turn. Like in the first Spider-Man , Harry alternated between beng a smug loser and a dangerously petulant aggressor. But unlike Doc Ock, Harry wasn't a compelling antagonist. While he worked as a thorn in Peter and Spider-Man's side, Harry's villainous turn wasn't as tragic as it should've been. The Spider-Man movies never effectively sold the friendship between Peter and Harry , making Harry's newfound villainy by the sequel's end feel more perfunctory than heartbreaking.

If any moment in the sequel lacked emotional resonance, it was when Harry found out that Peter was Spider-Man. It's difficult to find a reason why this would matter to him, other than Harry supposedly being Peter's best friend. This version of Harry worked best when Raimi showed audiences how inept he was at following his father's footsteps, not as Peter's fated nemesis.

Tobey Maguire & Kristen Dunst Elevated Their Performances in Spider-Man 2

The tension between peter parker and mary jane watson was as gripping as the super-powered fights, kirsten dunst reveals the one superhero movie she's watched since spider-man 3.

Despite not looking like teenagers who just made it to college, Tobey Maguire and Kristen Dunst were perfectly cast as Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson . The former perfectly embodied Peter's earnest nerdiness, especially when he declared himself to be "Spider-Man no more." In the first movie, Peter couldn't believe his luck when he woke up physically fit, able to see without glasses and shooting webs out of his wrist. But in the sequel's opening, he was fed up with these gifts. When his powers vanished -- which was confirmed in Spider-Man: No Way Home to be anxiety-related -- viewers bought the relief Peter felt in no longer bearing his great responsibility or power. This iteration of Peter doesn't often get to be truly happy. Peter even literally turned his back on a potential relationship with MJ at the end of the first movie.

Dunst complemented Maguire's performance by portraying MJ as an understandably frustrated actor, friend and potential lover. She always gave Peter chances, but knew he never told her the whole truth. This caused their break-up, and her affection for John Jameson (Daniel Gillies) during this time was handled well. John only existed in the sequel to be an impediment to MJ and Peter making things work. Spider-Man 2 never stopped treating John like a consolation prize, a safe bet and someone who MJ was never truly satisfied with. So when she's drawn back to Peter after he finally made the smallest bit of effort (namely revealing that he was Spider-Man), MJ's return worked in large part because of how Dunst played those moments .

Similarly, Ursula Ditkovich (Magelina Tovah) existed in the movie as something of a consolation prize for Peter. She's interested in him, and when he shared his chocolate cake with her, it was because Peter was trying to accept that MJ would not be in his life. Their awkward and intentional lack of chemistry is just another sign that no other partner would do for these characters. In brief, Ursula was Peter's answer to what John represented in MJ's life.

Just like the aforementioned bank robbery and superhero adventures, the sequel found a way to make the common trope of the bride fleeing her wedding to run to her true love feel fresh and unique. Spider-Man 2's final scene is the best relationship moment in all three of Raimi's films. Besides being an emotionally cathartic closer that directly contrasted the first movie's more bittersweet final seconds, MJ had agency and Peter got to be who he really was with her.

Spider-Man 2 Got (Almost) Everything Right

No superhero movie is perfect, but spider-man 2 is as close to perfection as the genre will get, kirsten dunst opens up about huge pay disparity with spider-man co-star tobey maguire.

Spider-Man 2's main advantage over its predecessor is the lack of an origin story . Both sides of Peter were present and fully formed from start to finish, even if Spider-Man vanished during the second act. The sequence in which a powerless Peter rescued people from a burning building underscored his selfless heroism without the need to explain everything the way an origin movie would. He was also right in the sweet spot for a Spidey story. He's no longer living with Aunt May, but he's not even close to having his life together. Until Doctor Octopus, the web-slinging stuff was easy. It's Peter's personal life that presented the nearly insurmountable challenges.

The returning cast also fit their roles better. J.K. Simmons's spiteful J. Jonah Jameson showed impressive range for a vindictive reactionary who just wanted pictures of Spider-Man. Similarly, Rosemary Harris portrayed Aunt May with a strength she didn't seem to possess in the first film. She even pulled off the comedic beats during Doc Ock's attack on the bank. On paper, Dafoe's reprisal of Norman Osborn as Harry's hallucination should've been a gratuitous cameo. Instead, it's a necessary part in pushing Harry on his path of living up to his father's villainous legacy.

Inevitably, there are some stylistic and narrative choices that make Spider-Man 2 feel very much "of its time." Some modern viewers will find certain scenes, lines or performances corny and predictable by today's standards. That said, Spider-Man 2 is one of the rare movies where such perceived "flaws" make it even more timeless. Some of the fully digital characters have an uncanny quality to them, but they fit with the exaggerated reality of this corner of the Marvel multiverse. Even underdeveloped characters like John and Ursula serve the larger story in essential ways, and are difficult to forget.

Spider-Man 2 is the film that made Sony's burgeoning franchise into a genuine institution. It's an eminently rewatchable movie that makes a fantastic argument that superhero films are truly cinema.

Spider-Man 2 is available to own on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital. The sequel is now streaming on Disney+, and will return to theaters on April 22, 2024.

Spider-Man 2

Peter Parker is beset with troubles in his failing personal life as he battles a brilliant scientist named Doctor Otto Octavius.

Well-crafted story that elevates the characters and the genre.
Performances that perfectly blend dramatic and comedic moments.
Grounded in heavy emotion, it never loses its sense of fantasy and fun.
Visual effects stunning at the time, hold up well through a modern lens.
The film could've used more time with characters like John Jameson or Curt Connors.
Harry Osborn's friendship with Peter could've been stronger before being broken.
Peter's conflict with Aunt May isn't exaimed enough and resolves too easily.
Set the bar so high, the next sequel couldn't possibly meet it.

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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan.

Kenji Kamiyama
Jeffrey Addiss
Phoebe Gittins
Will Matthews
Miranda Otto
Shaun Dooley

Brian Cox in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024)

Helm Hammerhand

Fréaláf Hildeson
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Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
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‘The Old Oak’ Review: The Audacity of Hope

A family of Syrian refugees connects with a once-thriving mining town in Ken Loach’s moving drama.

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A woman and a man sit in a church pew smiling at each other.

By Alissa Wilkinson

“The Old Oak” is named for the pub where much of its action happens — an old drinking hole in a village outside of Durham, England, that’s seen better days. Its back room, once a gathering place for the miners and their families who populated the town a generation ago, has been locked up for many years, fallen to disuse. Its walls are still hung with photographs of those miners taken during the lengthy strike of 1984-1985 , a labor effort that ended without the resolution the miners sought and with weakened trade unions. But during the action, the village marched in solidarity — at least for a while — and came together to share meals in that back room, to support one another, a point of pride for the men who were children back then.

When the movie begins, it is 2016, the year of the Brexit vote. It’s hard to imagine that kind of unity happening any more. The village has slowly emptied out, closing down places like the church hall, which had been a gathering spot. The village’s real estate is being bought up at auction by entities abroad, driving down the value of houses owned by locals, leaving them with nothing to live on in old age. Jobs are scarce. Money is tight. Children barely have enough to eat. And so in the Old Oak, a handful of regulars sit around, bitterly decrying the state of things.

They have lately found a target for their rage: a few families of Syrian refugees who have been settled in the village, helped along by a local charity worker named Laura (Claire Rodgerson) and Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who goes by TJ and owns the Old Oak. He’s the one who has to listen to the regulars gripe and spew racist epithets about the refugees, always clarifying that they’re “not racist.” He says nothing. He doesn’t think he can. He needs their business to scrape by. He knows their private lives are no picnic either. And if the pub isn’t there, they’ll just go home and wind one another up on the internet anyhow.

But TJ is lonely, and cares about the newcomers, though he’s afraid at first to become too involved with their lives. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with Yara (Ebla Mari), a young Syrian woman who speaks English, having learned after two years of volunteering with nurses while living in the refugee camps. Yara has arrived in town with her mother and several younger siblings. They don’t know where their father is because he was taken from them by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Her life has been worse, by any measure, than those of the men in the pub — but it feels almost obscene to make the comparison.

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You’d know “The Old Oak” was directed by Ken Loach (from a screenplay by his long-running collaborator Paul Laverty) even if his name wasn’t in the credits. His late work is unmistakable, driven by fierce moral clarity and outrage on behalf of the people whom capitalism and Britain’s government, supposedly constructed for citizens’ benefit, have left behind. His previous film “Sorry We Missed You,” for instance, is a blindly infuriated (and infuriating) film about a father who takes a job as a delivery driver to make ends meet, only to discover that everything about this job is designed to prosper the owner but ruin his life and his family.

Loach’s style remains forthright, even blunt, with few cinematic flourishes (though it’s still beautiful, shot by the great Robbie Ryan) and with a secondary cast largely made up of nonprofessional actors. This can make his movies feel like cudgels, but in “The Old Oak” it works brilliantly; at moments, I caught myself thinking I was watching a documentary. The film isn’t based on any single true story, but on many, including those shared by the Syrian refugees who were settled into the poorest towns in northern England. Loach makes a conscious choice to resist constructing shots which might direct us to think of characters as demons or angels, a matter-of-factness that suggests that while these people retain individual moral agency, it is limited and constrained. They are players in a production where they don’t get to write the script, which doesn’t absolve the racism and inhospitality but does provide some clarity on where it’s coming from.

Midway through “The Old Oak,” TJ and Yara have cooked up a plan to build connections between the Syrians and the villagers. (Don’t worry: this is not some easy, Hollywood ending.) “This is about solidarity, not charity,” TJ explains, and I have been thinking about that line for days. It perfectly encapsulates what “The Old Oak” understands and what so many similar films miss. Charity sets up an inherent power differential: those who have, giving to those who don’t. It is a necessary part of creating a functioning society.

But a much stronger and more lasting force is solidarity, a unity built on common interests and objectives. In “The Old Oak,” a bit of charity is possible — resources brought in from churches and labor unions that have money and goods to spare. For the villagers, though, resources are already scarce. The memory of solidarity, however, runs through their veins, even if it’s been lost in their hometown’s decay. Recapturing it will change how they live together.

Will that fix their problems? No. It won’t, and Loach and Laverty know this. In place of magical thinking and a happy ending, “The Old Oak” serves up something harder: a meditation on hope. “I have a friend who calls hope obscene,” Yara tells TJ. “Maybe she’s right. But if I stop hoping, my heart will stop beating.”

Yara’s way of hoping lies in looking through her camera lens, a tool that, since before the camps, was her way to see the world differently. And everyone in town, captured through Yara’s camera, suddenly sees themselves differently: not as the selves they project onto social media or in gripe sessions, but as bearers of dignity.

Loach, who is 87, has said “The Old Oak” might be his final film. So it’s not hard to see what he sees in Yara. Her discussion of hope, of a camera as a tool to spot strength in those who are usually passed over or objectified, sounds as though it might be a thesis for his own life and work. Hope can seem obscene. But when it ends, so too does the life of the world.

The Old Oak Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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A Man Called Otto review – formulaic but charming grumpy old man movie