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July 16, 2021
Kevin Hart can make us laugh and cry, it seems, even if the vehicle was practically engineered to bring on the waterworks. In “Fatherhood,” on Netflix on Friday, he plays a new dad whose wife dies shortly after childbirth and he's left raising their daughter on his own.
To be fair, there's been many built-in tearjerkers that have failed (remember “Life Itself”?). But something has to go very, very wrong for a film to mess up that kind of premise. “Fatherhood” doesn't just succeed on that emotional level, though — it's also a cut about the rest, thanks to a smart and funny and basically authentic script (director Paul Weitz and Dana Stevens) and Hart's inspired casting.
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