Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

B24 If I were to attempt a comparison, I'd think of Mexico's interesting film "Japón." But comparisons are tricky, since they can never capture more than bits and pieces -- and that includes remakes as well.The languor of this film is consistent with its subject and its theme. Likewise the cinematic device of reflection, full of suggestion without actually insulting the viewer's intelligence by having to show every scene or expression straight on. Perhaps only an old person can appreciate it fully, sensing how solitude gradually creeping into one's life as one ages tends to alter perceptions even of the most common sort. Everything slows down with age. Self-image lingers longest, and to attempt rejuvenation proves futile in the end. At last there is resignation, and maybe a kind of peace.Given all this, I find no fault with anything except possibly the lack of effective close-ups or more incisive dialogue in the film. Even John Malkovich deserves a chance to prove he is uncharacteristically not just part of a dramatic frieze.

mrmjoh This film is really awful, in my opinion. It tries to be profound, moving, humanist and everything, but the only image actually communicated through it is one of a boring old (Oliveira obviously being in his nineties) classicist, snobbishly holding his nose at all the puerile excesses of mainstream, popular entertainment cinema; or, for that part, the more bewitched strains of art cinema. It makes me real mad: this passes itself of as Art, but is really nothing more than REACTION, imposing the sanctity of Time and the (male) Body, the Home and the Family. Why we even go to the movies, the sheer fun and fascination of cinema, the possession of the screen, the delirium of the moving image, is passed of as something for all those mindless, illiterate adolescents, out of touch (thankfully) with the eternal laws of the Masterpiece, the bourgeois privations around art that we´d better do without. Shame really, with the waste of talent going on here: Michel Piccoli is, arguably, one of the greatest french actors of all time, and it´s not that he´s bad here, he just doesn´t have anything to work with. On this point, check out Marco Ferreri´s La Grande Bouffe, one of the most deliriously unpleasant films ever, and with the equally great Philippe Noiret; or Claude Faraldo´s Themroc, where Piccoli coughs, grunts and laughs his way through the role of a modern day cave man and barbarian, a film without a hint of legible/audible dialogue. Rate: 0.5 out of 10000.

fredjohnjohn Tedium taken to a level too boring to describe. Scenes go on and on ...... The actors look very uneasy at least I think they do as most of the time the light is very bad or the Director has set afocus on something removed from the characters.John Malkovitch is wasted and Piccoli seems bemused by the lack of any coherent storyline.An experience for insomniacs only.

phranger This is a superbly played, superbly framed film about a very interesting idea. It is simply three times too long. The film follows an aging actor, Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli), from the moment he learns his wife, their only child and her husband died in a car accident, to the moment he suddenly turns old.Valence, who is either shown or heard in every scene, has very few words to say except when playing, first in Ionesco's Le Roi se meurt, then in the Tempest (both in French) and last while shooting a film in English, Joyce's Ulysses. That last role ends with the title words, I'm going back home, when Valence simply walks out rather than deal with his failure to master Joyce's words while keeping the wanted character and pacing.The remaining minutes show him walking in a Paris suburb, from the studio to his home, while mumbling his role in English. This gives us the time to realize that all the while, since his wife's death, he's been sticking close to home, going through the well-known daily habits of his life, and equally well-known roles. Only the short appearance in Ulysses would have taken him into new territory. Turning old is choosing not to go outside the life one knows. In Valence's case, it's rather not going outside of what is left of his life, once the most important people in it have been killed.The only other major speaking role belongs to Valence's agent, Georges (Antoine Chappey). Unfortunately, it is marred by an absence of those concrete details that convince the viewer that this is not sketch for a character, but a living human being. One scene, for instance, has Valence refuse a TV role which Georges is pushing because of the money involved, but Georges only gets to call it "lots", without giving even an approximation.That deficiency in realistic detail mars other aspects of the film too. However, John Malkovich, playing the American film director, breaks through, he is quite convincing. My suspicion is that he wrote his own lines. Even if the deficiency were fixed, though, Oliveira would still only have material for thirty minutes. His own failure is in not facing up to that. But Piccoli's playing is sublime, and the wordless showing of Valence's implicit choices through well-framed moments, is also a lesson in filming.