"The Circle" is a fairly new American live action short film. It says here on imdb that it is a 2018 release, but the Youtube video I watched where the director uploaded it was from 2017 already. It runs for 7 minutes plus another 3 minutes of credits, so you can actually watch this one pretty quickly. But you really only should if you are a great fan of Ryan Phillippe (who's basically the only grown-up actors here next to a cast of young performers), a pretty big rising star a few years, actually decades almost, back when he was with Reese Witherspoon still. Director Schwartz here made this as his most recent work and he is certainly not a rookie, even if he is far from being as prolific as his writer Olmstead here. The film plays a long time back and we watch a father-son story with a little crime included too and a bit for the heart, but really nothing of it all is too effective from the story-telling perspective I must say. The area where the film delivers best and maybe the only area where the film really delivers is the physical looks. Camera work, costumes and sets are all solid, I just wish the plot could have been better or at least had more attention to detail. The way it actually turned out I must give the movie a thumbs-down as a whole and I find it fairly overrated here on imdb. Not recommended.
Review of The Circle
