A story about the weight of memory as it\u2019s shared between a pair of forgotten men, \u201cFrank & Louis\u201d never steps foot outside of the upstate New York penitentiary where the younger of its title characters is transferred at the start of the film. The first thing we sense about Frank (a crushed and compellingly recessive Kingsley Ben-Adir) is that he\u2019s used to life in a loose-fitting jumpsuit. Long and fit but dead behind the eyes in a way that makes him look much older than he is, Frank has been in prison for at least half of his time on this earth, though the only specific information we get is that it\u2019s been 17 years since he suffered through a stint in solitary confinement. He\u2019s cooled down since then. Maybe he\u2019s found a lasting measure of peace in the toy motorcycles he carves out of soap in his cell. Or maybe he\u2019s just given up.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to glean much of anything from his non-reaction to the news that he\u2019s up for parole, but Frank agrees to join the Yellow Coats \u2014 the prison\u2019s in-house memory care program \u2014\u00a0in a bid to make him seem worthier of release. After just a few minutes with Louis (a fully committed Rob Nelson, never betraying his character\u2019s mental condition for the sake of a more emotionally digestible film) it feels like the gig might blow up in Frank\u2019s face, as he seems more liable to kill the old-timer than to help him tie his shoes. Louis is such a tough customer that Frank would sooner be assigned to the unit\u2019s biggest skinhead \u2014\u00a0at least that guy is too far gone to hate people anymore. Maybe it\u2019s just the fact that he looks like an oversized baby, but the towering bigot radiates a pitiable innocence that\u2019s only belied by his unavoidable swastika tattoo; the ink that identified him as a Nazi has outlasted the ideology that made him one in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n Louis is a different story. Although a pale shadow of the vicious gang leader that he used to be, 60-year-old Louis still brims with the rage and ferocity that once made him king of the prison yard; all of the same emotions are still kicking around inside him, but they\u2019ve been completely unmoored from their context, and sharpened by the shiv-like volatility of dementia. A roaring lion one minute and a helpless lamb the next, Louis is so clearly at the mercy of his disease that Frank struggles to imagine that his new friend could be the same man who made enemies or underlings out of all the other inmates. When another convict pressures Frank to let him beat the shit out of Louis in his cell (revenge for a previous slight of some kind), Frank agrees with an indifferent shrug \u2014 not only is it not any of his business, it doesn\u2019t seem to be Louis\u2019 business, either. At least not the Louis that he knows.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ben-Adir and Morgan bring a raw and layered energy to the dynamic between their characters, and while the relationship between them thaws and complicates along a very predictable trajectory, progressive brain afflictions don\u2019t exactly lend themselves to novelty or surprises. That Volpe and Esther Bernstorff\u2019s script is overly diagrammed on a scene-by-scene basis is more difficult to ignore (when Frank and Louis sit down to play chess, you know it\u2019s only a matter of time before the latter swipes all of the pieces off the board in a fit of rage), but the actors are too locked into the circumstances at hand for the movie to ever meaningfully diminish the urgency of the questions it\u2019s trying to ask. It also helps that \u201cFrank & Louis\u201d tends to unfold in a minor key, and that even its most nakedly sentimental plot points \u2014 such as Louis\u2019 persistent belief that he\u2019s got a lunch date scheduled with his daughter \u2014 are undergirded by the kind of hard truths that leave you with a fuller appreciation for the lives these characters have led.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, \u201cFrank & Louis\u201d is at its best during the subtler moments when its minute human gestures contrast against the art house stiffness of Volpe\u2019s compositions (the Swiss \u201cLate Shift\u201d director brings a small but welcome dose of European formalism to her English-language debut), and the glassy abstractions of Oliver Coates\u2019 score. Watching Frank learn to touch Louis without either of them flinching is a movie unto itself (Rene Perez Joglar is excellent as a Yellow Coats veteran with hypersensitivities of his own), and it\u2019s heart-rending to watch these two men forge new sense memories between them in the short time they have together.\u00a0<\/p>\n The more that Louis forgets about his past, the more that Frank comes to reconsider about his own, and while Frank\u2019s backstory isn\u2019t quite as textured as Volpe needed for her movie to deliver a lastingly powerful gut-punch, it crucially resists the temptation to answer its most pressing questions. What\u2019s the point of punishment if someone doesn\u2019t understand what they\u2019re being punished for? Are these the same men they were back when they committed their crimes? It\u2019s the Ship of Theseus paradox in human form, its discrete parts held together by a quietly stirring drama that finds dignity in decay, and grace in the memory of men who the rest of society would sooner forget.<\/p>\n Grade: B<\/p>\n \u201cFrank & Louis\u201d premiered at the 2026 Sundance<\/a> Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,878,136355,85,46,397,1530,19830],"class_list":{"0":"post-258309","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-frank-louis","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-reviews","15":"tag-sundance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Burn\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/BURN-Still_2.jpg\")
<\/a> ![\"'Undertone'\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Screen-Shot-2026-01-25-at-4.11.11-PM.png\")
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