Popular reviews

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  Review by Hari Nef 4

  i wasn't going to review this because it felt like there was too much to say, but weeks later i'm still ranting and raving about–yeah–my fav of the year

  like lol i was powerless to resist: a french arthouse film about a punishingly beautiful female celebrity named "france." she has white skin and blue eyes; she favors blood red lipstick

  'france' devotes thousands of seconds to closeups of france's face: trembling to contorted, crying or trying not to. 'france' shrieks its metaphors: "france cries!" "france laughs!" "france loses!" "france wins!" a younger man–also beautiful, a journalist–wails on the side of the road: "i love you france!"

  dumont's satire is affective rather than purely discursive; 'france's' france pulls goofy faces in…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 2

  An essay on how images are created, projected and consumed. It is inseparable from Seydoux movie star performance, one of the year's best but also one that exists pretty much as a star text that both impose herself over everything else and is getting mined by the camera. France is loaded with signifiers, I mean it is called France, Macron is literally in the opening scene, but it is not really a media satire at least not in the Network kind of way. Part of Dumont genius is that there is really not much difference between third rate TV news and Cannes approved auteur vehicles, the specific thrall of manufactered image is disturbing close and the movie doesn't really allow…

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★½ 3

  Reality rendered as fiction, an essay on images (or maybe more simply an essay on Seydoux’s image, which is almost the same thing here). The film departs from a poisonous depiction of media articulated from its guts, a world of artifice where truth lies always on its borders, a world of spectacle that summarizes a relation of love and hate with a country, its politics and the media’s role on all that. With an intensely satirical tone and heavily flirting with melodrama, it internalizes this discourse in its form and narrative, and specially on its main character, the semiotic symbol that encapsulates all this. And the film really does a great job on showcasing a very vivid portrait of France…

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  Review by John ★★★ 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Cassidy Olsen ★½ 1

  Léa Seydoux’s crying pout vs. Florence Pugh’s crying pout cage match

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  Review by shookone ★★ 2

  as usual with Bruno Dumont his satirical outings are painfully clumsy and on-the-nose endeavours. this one now is so openly caricaturesque, that he forgets a little bit about his wooden and tenaciously dogmatic style, and stages what feels like a very open satire of the media landscape, political world and double standards of a society with the cultural hegemony. fake tears and more fake tears. staging, orchestrating and spreading more tears. only in the betrayal lies the moment of true emotions. and what is love if not the fakest and truest affect of them all?

  Dumont finally translates his ivory tower cinema into a very direct language, and as stiff as this might still be, i do appreciate the development. it continues to be a questionable way of filmmaking, but the biting critique is very palpable this time around.

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  Review by k. 5

  Who names their kid france

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ suspirliam ˊˎ˗ ★★★★ 2

  léa seydoux is a force to be reckoned with what an absolute powerhouse

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  Review by Patrick Preziosi ★★★★½ 3

  Neo-neorealism, because what is modern realism if not outwardly acknowledging the process that allows it to claim such a distinction? Like the photo-negative of Rossellini’s Europa ’51, a paragon of status and celebrity only achieves more, following a fairly quotidian accident that leaves Léa Seydoux internally shaken nevertheless. The ubiquitous desire to manufacture and package “the real” drives this entire film, each marvelous smash/match-cut a continued compounding of facilitated distances within spaces that only continue to encroach upon one another: war zones and resorts, the newsroom and the field, the camera and “the camera”.

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  Review by David Conner ★ 15

  Since this is my first exposure to Bruno Dumont, I’ll reserve the right to revise my opinion of him at a later date, but for now, my judgment is this: he’s either a moron or a troll. 

  The Case for Moron: 
  A satire of broadcast media and its effects on society? In the 2020s!? Are you kidding me right now? Since this sort of thing has already been done so much more effectively by so many other more timely films — which I won’t even bother to start listing here since it could easily run into the dozens — a reasonable assumption is that he’s either hopelessly out of touch with all of culture and cinema, past and present, or…

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  Review by Sarah ★★½ 4

  Intended as a satire of journalism, this was just a worse Arthur Rambo for guys with a femdom fantasy about Lea Seydoux. At it's best it is a lot™ of movie, flashy maximalism and star power, at its worst a whinging shakey romance. Emmanuel Macron at his best performance yet

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  Review by RentonDuc ★★ 5

  Ça commence comme une satire facile, pas drôle et embarrassante mais le film se rend vite compte que sur deux heures ce n'est pas possible, alors il glisse difficilement vers un ton plus grave. Mais ce ton ne fonctionne pas non plus parce que son personnage France est comme les images qu'elle présente, vidées de toute substances et de toute vérité, elle passe son temps à montrer de l'émotion mais n'en fait ressentir aucune.

  Dumont filme toujours de la même manière le drame psychologique de son héroïne, gros plan en léger traveling avant sur le visage de France, mais n'y pénètre jamais, on reste à la surface du personnage qui est un peut-être vide, ou peut-être simplement devenu une surface…