I’ll post some full thoughts on this one later today from a West Coast critic friend who is attending tonight’s screening.
George Clooney’s “The Tender Bar” screened for BAFTA, DGA and select film critics on Saturday and Sunday evening. Reception has been thus far positive, with numerous people citing Ben Affleck’s performance The words “sweet” and “touching” keep coming up in these reactions.
Starring Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Christopher Lloyd & Lily Rabe, the film’s official premise describes this as the story of “a boy growing up on Long Island who seeks out father figures among the patrons at his uncle's bar.”
The film will be getting an Oscar-qualifying release this year, but not before having its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in a few weeks. Amazon Studios will release it in LA & NY Theaters on December 17th, and it will then expand wide on December 22nd, followed by a global release on Amazon Prime Video on January 7th, 2022.
I liked three of Clooney’s directorial films (“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March”), but, of late, he’s been struggling behind the camera with such duds as “Leatherheads,” “Suburbicon,” “The Monument’s Men,” and last year’s “The Midnight Sky” — the latter also had a late Oscar-qualifying run in 2020. Remind me how that went?