Its intention is to put human faces to ISIS recruits, but its representation of radicalization is still uncomfortably one-sided.
André Téchiné does justice to the closeness between repulsion and desire, difference and sameness.
Too worried about narrative fidelity and formal objectivity to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film’s concerns.
Téchiné’s reputation for unruly, melodramatic narratives is set in stark relief by 1979s The Bronte Sisters
The film, a layered, character-driven drama with the aura of a sunny Venetian noir, never quite bursts into full-blown mayhem.
André Téchiné may not be part of the nuclear family of neo-neorealists, but he’s definitely a member of the tribe.
The Witnesses is infused with tenderness, fury, and quiet grief.
Identity, whether anchored in family, eros, or heritage, is at the root of The Girl on the Train.
You know the drill: No guild is better at predicting the winner of the Best Picture Oscar than the Directors Guild of America.
The bare-bones treatment doesn’t make this representative selection from a major auteur’s sober, elegiac vision of late 20th-century French life any less valuable.
André Téchiné moves his narrative along with a perilous kind of speed.
A moral tale that isn’t saddled with moralism, The Witnesses is a novelistic film in the best sense.
The film is a chimera of poignant, tangled socio-politically charged ellipses with an atmosphere that affects a sense of musical healing.