Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Sloan

  So far beyond Late Style. The ashes of Late Style. Occasionally beautiful. Deeply sad. This is what it’s like to communicate with a terminally ill man a few days away from the end.

  Not entirely sure what to do with the fact that the final words of the final Godard film are “…that’s before they were a Jewish agency…” followed by a smash-cut to black. Can’t remember what the agency was; not sure Godard made it clear.

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  Review by Will Sloan 1

  When I saw Jean-Luc Godard's final completed film at TIFF last fall, I was a little baffled by it, and hoped – as I often did whenever I saw a new Godard film at TIFF – that it might magically reveal all of its meaning on a second viewing. Now I’ve seen it a second time, pausing often to take notes, and I’m still a little baffled by it. Possibly I’m looking for “meaning” in the wrong place, or in too literal a sense (I do sometimes have a tendency to want to turn poetry into prose). On first viewing, its series of seemingly disconnected sounds and collages, often featuring words and images familiar from earlier Godard films, reminded me…

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  Review by eddie

  It wouldn't be very Godardian to make a true swan song before leaving this mortal coil, that'd be too sentimental or gaudy. Instead, he takes a concept that he's been working with for decades, the collage, and makes it literal in form. You see the Kodak film scanner backdrop and the hand-written page numbers on the top right corner; these are tactile images physically laid on top of one another to create dissonance. It wouldn't be very Godardian to make this easy on the viewer, so there's the very tricky push and pull of adapting a novel into a film, and using collage as a third medium, the point of the triangle. His essay films merged collage with the cinematic…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 1

  If it is a sketch, I do apreciate the way it moves from the blank canvas towards the more concrete traces of ther never to be movie right down to his voice so central to so much of his post Dziga Vertov work. There is the tension between art and advertisement, between the compromises one make to keep creating images and a advancea discurse on them and the ways Godard's form have long operate an intervention. Now to think about all the movies we will never see.

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  Review by jawn dielman 1

  godard probably doing a jig in the clouds knowing there were over 15 walkouts for this

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 7

  metaphor/mysticism/movies, notes on a future canon. godard leaves us with a century's scrapbook, answers without any referent questions -- the image-as-calligraphy, color, collision. even his last words are cut off by his own silences -- what is best in life? "to become immortal... and then die."

  the grey god passes; cinema-as-sacrifice.

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  Review by Josefina (Girl On The Shore) ★★★★★

  “Just an announcement”

  Devastated when I heard his voice one last time, when the words escape him, but as he tries to conjure something of pure meaning, his narration gets cut off by silence, by everything his work aspired to be.
  Everything that we can process are passages of novels, names that are omitted and those horrors that were once the subjects of his films manipulated one more time before relegating to the fabric of Saint Laurent as depository, artists' conduct of expression via a fashion house.
  He once made commercials for Nike and Schick, he now has his last film be produced by those who reduced images to their most commercial terms.

  And yet, it slowly filters the conception…

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  Review by Katie Prior ★★★★★ 2

  If The Image Book was Godard’s funeral, this is the will reading full of surprises. It’s hard to not leave this smiling—it feels like Godard fooled us all, making us think he was at his end only to show that he was really just beginning. Not even death can stop him. He’ll be wearing that blue plastic visor and smoking his cigars forever.

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  Review by owen ★★★★ 5

  We must strive to be more painter than writer.

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  Review by coffee

  if such a thing as post-cinema ever existed this is probably what it looks like. what it must feel like to speak as a dying man who can only communicate through his art and through his images

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  Review by Hutch ★★★★ 3

  Godard’s final film starts with a joke: “it’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there”, and it might be his way of saying whatever you’re looking for here, forget it, because this is quintessentially cryptic, fractured, and exasperating. And yet, it is brilliant. It begins as a slowly moving slideshow, with each frame a collage of art and text and a surprising absence of music. And then Kurtág’s Ligatura erupts with a mournful dirge and a narrator joins in the despair, and I’m starting to get La Jetée vibes. And then Silvestrov’s music collides with Kurtág’s bringing thoughts of the Ukrainian conflict over text evoking memories of ‘68. The music is assertive and even…

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  Review by noma ★★★★★ 4

  PROPERTY OF KINO LORBER
  JUST AN ANNOUNCEMENT
  IT'S NO GOOD WITHOUT A LITTLE BLOOD
  14:58 - 15:37

  jean-luc godard is scared, and this is his nightmare.

  it's fine for him to be scared; he's made so many baller moves & movies in his lifetime that it's natural for him to toy with his fears, especially in his old age. he's been this godlike figure in movie circles for such a long time that it's honestly refreshing for a film of his to betray the human behind the camera & his trepidations, his thoughts on the future of his field, and on his mortality. it's fitting, then, that this trailer for a film which will never exist is godard's final picture for the…