Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 11

  CW: concentration camps, suicide mention

  What tragedies have our mothers endured. It seems clear to me that the world's improvements are minimal, that what "progress" we make in how oppressed people are treated by our oppressors is a minor fraction of what we deserve, of actual equity, equality, community. Still, there has been some progress, some minor gains in certain parts of the world, tiny improvements. It's better now, and it was worse in our mothers' time. In our grandmothers' time. In our great-grandmothers' time. Seen as a whole, it was worse (in specific, it is hard to imagine a worse time or world than the one Chantal Akerman's mother experienced). Even our mothers who never saw the inside of…

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  Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★★ 4

  "The opening frame of Chantal Akerman’s final film No Home Movie is a near-static shot of a barren tree being torn apart by vicious bursts of wind. The old tree doesn’t fall, but you have to wonder how it persists in spite of the surroundings. She holds her camera on this tree for about four minutes, allowing the viewer to feel the passage of time and ponder the reasons why she held the camera on that tree for so long and what it could possibly mean. The image doesn’t necessarily open itself up to easy interpretation—Akerman was never one to make an easy picture—but it informs the type of experience that Chantal’s mother, Natalia, is going through during her final…

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  Review by Erin Provolone ★★★★½ 1

  "Where is Chantal?"

  Tying her shoes, getting up, closing the curtains, and leaving the frame as composed as she began it. Sounds continue, but their sources are offscreen.

  I don't know what drove Chantal Akerman to share so much of herself with us, but I wish I could thank her for it.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★

  "It was so great to have you here."
  "I haven't gone yet."

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

  I've been missing my parents and their home, so it felt like time to revisit this. My parents were very loving and also incredibly annoying, so I'm in the market for movies about grief and loss that are this tough and unsentimental.

  Natalia Akerman's apartment looks like the absolute median apartment that an elderly middle-class woman would have. It's neat, tidy, and thoughtfully decorated, but also not even remotely stylish, and looks like it hasn't been updated in 30 years. Chantal Akerman shoots it with consumer-grade digital video that does nothing to make it prettier. We get a lot of shots of empty rooms and quotidian activities in this home, and this is both a challenge and opportunity for the…

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  Review by Sophy ★★★★½ 1

  It’s difficult to watch this film objectively without considering the tragic circumstances that surround it. Its normal to watch a film in which the characters/actors that occupy it are now deceased, but in the case of No Home Movie, it almost feels like that element is part of the film. It reads part love letter, and part suicide note. It’s filled with such jarring emotional contrasts: maternal love & memories of the holocaust. Akerman’s mother asks over Skype why she is filming her and she replies “Because I want to show that there is no distance in the world.” The connection between her and her mother is indisputably strong, one can only imagine the heartbreak Akerman felt in losing her considering…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★ 23

  To the mother who raised me on her own when I was too young to understand all the sacrifices she made. All the money she invested in my education and extracurriculars while she spent her nights in our apartment doing extra work to pay for it all, all the time she spent going to night-school so she could get her own education to help support us better. As a kid I could tell she was giving so much of herself to me and I would always tell her "you don't need to buy this for me" or "I don't need anything for my birthday, I promise" because I hated seeing her spend for me. I wanted to be small, unobtrusive,…

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  Review by josh ★★★★★ 11

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★½ 1

  super frustrating. lost in the limbo between hyper-personal document and universal essay film, Akerman's portrait of her mother's final years (months?) is exactly the kind of record that we always tell ourselves we'll make of our parents and grandparents... a video testament of who they were. telling their stories. usually about the holocaust. the ones told by Akerman's mother can only have value to us in the abstract, as they're much too specific and scattershot. the film is perhaps more successful, albeit more frustrating, when it twists the emphasis of the title...

  not "no home movie," as if the title is a boast, but rather "no home / movie"... a movie about a nomadic existence, Akerman's untethered lifestyle (she's in…

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  Review by Josiah Morgan ★★★★★

  We're all alone, even if we share our loneliness with others. There are bursts of childish exuberance as simple as pop music playing on the radio, mostly heartbreaking because of how much of a literal home movie this is. This is exactly the movie I would make in the same situation (I'm not saying I'm anywhere near as good as Akerman is) which further reinforces my belief that Akerman is one of the greatest artists ever to have lived. I mostly love the gaps: only viewing the subject of the entire film through a doorway, or a shot through a window onto the street - wanting to get out of your confines (mentally and physically) but your only escape is…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★

  From the material to immaterial. Current digital cinema operates towards dissolving the concrete instead of affirming it. Films both struggle to fight against it and find ways to explore its possibilities. The world “no” is obvious the key one in the title. The struggling with technology another way to try to present a disappearance. As often the case in her more autobiographical films it is suggestive, sometimes painful in how her and her mother go in their power struggle dance about becoming and not becoming characters in her movie, often moving, yet more heavy theoretical than her other similar work.

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  Review by DamRibeiro ★★★★½ 7

  A última obra de Chantal Akerman retrata os momentos finais da vida de sua mãe, um tempo depois do lançamento desse filme Chantal tira a própria vida cometendo suicídio, sentir o final da vida e como sentir esse filme, para Akerman sua mãe era o epicentro da sua existência, a presença da mãe permeava suas histórias de maneira bastante pessoal, e nessa singela captura de imagens da mãe dentro de casa sentimos a vida é o vazio que permeiam esse lugar, junto dos silêncios que habitavam esse espaço, parece até que estamos espreitando e meio deslocados por conta dos enquadramentos, como se estivéssemos se esticando para bisbilhotar esse pequeno microcosmo tão particular, vagamos por esse apartamento é a medida que…