The film shrinks your expectations until you give up out of exaustion.
What I once hailed as the best movie in the history of the world (I was 13) is an uncomfortable thing that doesn’t rank with its creator’s best.
Those who have seen O Lucky Man! are familiar with its radical-chic frowny-pique.
One look at the appalling slum where Pedro Costa has set In Vanda’s Room seems comment enough.
The film is an astonishingly anti-dramatic take on the children of the failed May ‘68 revolution.
The emphasis on locations is where Claire Denis begins to rear her creative head.
We like to think that we’ve got a complete picture of what’s going on, or has gone on, in international cinema.
Breach is good enough to give you a whiff of the more complex film that might have been.
That the film maintains a tone of sickly whimsy throughout tells you all you need to know about the seriousness of the enterprise.
In terms of French cinema, Claire Denis is the synthesis of Bazinian realism and the cinema du look.
Looking at the poster for Venus, one could be forgiven for thinking that the end was near.
Instead of a reality and a fantasy that intertwine and comment on each other, we have two fantasies that are like ships that pass in the night.
The director’s visual sense doesn’t fail him; in fact, it makes the script’s more risible concepts seem more palatable than they should.