Pig

Pig (2021) is about a man living alone in an Oregon forest. Rob finds truffles with a pig and hands them to a young dealer who drives out once a week. One night someone breaks in, the pig is taken, and he goes down to Portland to find her. The setup promises a revenge film and does not deliver one. Rob beats nobody. What surfaces in the city is his past: he was once the best known chef in Portland, and every kitchen there remembers his name. The best scene is in a restaurant. Rob visits the ambitious place his former apprentice has opened, and takes him apart not with the food but with a few sentences about what the man actually wanted to do. It is Michael Sarnoski's first film. Nicolas Cage leads and almost never raises his voice; for most of the film his face is bloodied and he speaks quietly. It runs 92 minutes. Good for: quiet films about grief, stories about food and craft, and one of Cage's most restrained performances. Less good for: the marketing misleads anyone expecting action. The pace is slow and the plot is thin. The underground fight club sequence never quite fits with the rest.