Rob Rice's strangely compelling second feature observes a young man's reluctant bond with a deranged, insistent father figure, in a zombified slice of suburban nowhere.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
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Tribeca Film Festival One of the great secret weapons of American film and TV in recent years, solid-gold supporting actor Bill Camp gets a rare and fascinating leading showcase in “Ponderosa” — though in committing to Rob Rice’s quietly sinister and wildly peculiar black comedy, no one could accuse him of chasing the spotlight. A defiant oddity that deserves to find its own select and equally eccentric cult, the film fixes its gaze on two strange, sad male archetypes of modern suburbia — the purposeless, woefully outmoded boomer and the shiftless, willfully isolated zoomer — only to tease out yet stranger, sadder dynamics between them, in that specific American environment of strip malls and infinite parking lots where human connection goes to die.
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