Ponderosa
Rob Rice · 2026 · 90 minutes
Nov. 13 · Regal 2 · 5:15 p.m.
When the buffet where Zeke’s mom works closes down, he’s forced to entertain the advances of a rich regular who is weirdly obsessed with becoming his dad.
Programmer’s Note
In 1963, four seasons into Bonanza’s run on NBC, Dan Blocker, the gentle giant who played Hoss Cartwright, opened a steakhouse in Westport, Connecticut. Two years later, three businessmen in Kokomo, Indiana, launched a rival and named it after the Cartwrights’ ranch. For the next quarter century, Bonanza and Ponderosa sold the same fantasy to the first generation raised on TV westerns: wagon-wheel décor, a chuckwagon buffet, and a sirloin priced for the whole family. It was the Old West by way of a Hollywood backlot by way of a strip-mall parking lot, a copy of a copy of a place that never quite existed. At their late-’80s peak, the two chains counted more than a thousand locations. Today, only a dozen or so Ponderosas still remain.
Writer/director Rob Rice shot his second feature in one of the few surviving restaurants, and he puts all of that secondhand nostalgia to work. Zeke (Jack Dylan Grazer, It, Shazam!) is a twentysomething with no particular plans who drifts through the suburban sprawl southwest of Chicago and eats lunch at the Ponderosa where his mother, Sandra (Alexis Bledel, Gilmore Girls), works. There he’s cornered by George (Bill Camp), a lonely, well-off developer of cookie-cutter subdivisions who appoints himself Zeke’s mentor, then his boss, then something … stranger. As Rice told Eye For Film, “this film is about a boy being harangued and chased around by this wannabe father, who explicitly wants to reproduce without any of the emotional or biological components, only the ideological ones.”
Ponderosa, which premiered in competition at Tribeca, arrives in the middle of an anxious national argument about what has gone wrong with young men, and Rice’s sly joke is to hand the microphone to the people most eager to settle it, Boomers on one end of the spectrum, Gen Z on the other. George has a diagnosis for Zeke—“defective” ambition—and a cure: a desk job, a work ethic, a firm fatherly hand. The men George keeps company with have even grander plans, surrounding themselves with young Alpha men in the making. Camp, so often cast as the steadiest presence in the room, is hilarious and more than a little frightening as a man with a lifetime of wisdom to impart and no evidence to show of it ever having worked. Zeke’s reply to all of it is a shrug, which, in a culture that insists young men must be fixed, sold to, or recruited, is itself a political act.
Matt Porterfield and Megan Pickrell will introduce and discuss the film.
Matt Porterfield is a writer, director, and producer born and raised in Baltimore. He has written and directed four feature films, Hamilton (2006), Putty Hill (2011), I Used to Be Darker (2013) and Sollers Point (2018). In 2025, Matt produced four features: Clemente Castor’s Frió metal, Rob Rice’s Ponderosa, Bad Head by Jimmy Joe Roche, and an adaptation of Mario Bellatin’s novel Salon de belleza directed by Nathalia Acevedo. He is currently completing his first Spanish-language feature, Solo tengo sed, set in Mexico, where he is based.
Megan Pickrell, a producer based in NYC, earned acclaim with her first feature film, Family Portrait, dir. Lucy Kerr, which premiered at Locarno and received the Boccalino d’Oro prize for Best Director. Megan’s second feature as a producer, Ponderosa, dir. Rob Rice, premiered at Tribeca and stars Jack Dylan Grazer, Alexis Bledel and Bill Camp. She holds a certificate from Sundance Collab and an MFA from Penn State University, where she was honored with the Ty Burrell Scholarship. Megan is passionate about creating innovative and supportive environments for experimental filmmaking that pushes the boundaries of conventional storytelling.