Black Bear

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Carl S @RT09461891 Jul 14 ★☆☆☆☆ ★☆☆☆☆ Black Bear mistakes confusion for depth. The first half is a genuinely compelling psychological thriller. It earns your investment with great performances, sharp dialogue, and escalating tension. Then, halfway through, it throws that entire story away and replaces it with another one using the same actors, never giving a satisfying reason why. This isn’t a twist that recontextualizes what came before—it abandons it. By the end, the movie vaguely gestures at themes about art, manipulation, and blurred reality without ever saying much of anything. The payoff simply isn’t worth the structural bait-and-switch. Ambiguity isn’t the problem. Some of the greatest films ever made leave questions unanswered. Black Bear just made me feel like the story I’d spent 2 hours caring about never mattered. Sometimes I enjoy knowing what the fuck is going on. See more Rob A @RT76386004 May 8 Great acting by Aubrey Plaza, but the film was a bit too strange, confusing and anti-climactic for me. (It's a movie about the making of a movie btw.) See more Alain E @AlainE Apr 24 This is a great movie about film making, in my opinion at the same rank as Fellini’s 8 1/2. A lot of great passion is portrayed without feeling fake. Aubrey Plaza is absolutely spectacular. She performs as well as Mastroianni did for Fellini. On Tubi. See more R T @Snakeyb Apr 4 Amazing acting, great script and direction. Loved the originality of it all, a breath of fresh air. Plaza was incredible as were they all. My significant other really liked it, and said "good pick baby". See more D P @RT45936356 Mar 15 So... I was very confused watching this movie by the time we get to the second segment. I kept trying to guess what the connection was. Then the last shot suggests that she's a writer making this all up??? Okay... But I was entertained. See more Par H @Parhwy Mar 5 Black Bear is a 2020, 106-minute film I watched on Prime in two sittings in March 2026. The two sittings are explained by the first scene being… intense and annoying. I didn’t like the characters and dialogue. The second half of this film is intense-intense; the first half is annoying-intense up until the first half's final-final scene. At about 40-ish minutes in, all the annoyance goes and shit gets tense and interesting. It ends too soon. The acting is hefty however the story is a scaffold of hotboxed matchsticks. Aubrey Plaza has thinking, questioning eyes, giving her characters depth beyond words and aesthetic. In one scene, the musical score sounded reminiscent of Westworld. I’m not good with music so this could be me hallucinating. I took a lot of notes while watching this film. This film is intense, annoying and manipulative instead of suspenseful. Rewatch? No. Recommend: Yes. My no is because all the punchlines are one-offs, my yes is that you may see no or beyond annoyance. See more Read all reviews

Black Bear

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