SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

HeadlinesExotic Boring

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

sergepesic This beautiful, quiet and restrained French movie, flawlessly exposes the broken world we live in. Antiques, art, pieces of handcrafted stylish furniture, houses, land, all the material goods that defined the civilized world through centuries are becoming expendable. The new world order has no time nor place for sentimental values.Memories are waste of time, home we grew up in, just a real estate of different value, even family stretched across the globe, vanishes in this rat race called modern living. The affluent and self-absorbed siblings in "Summer Hours", fully embrace the shallow and ,simply unimportant, money grabbing planet we live on.

martin-hedegaard The first 30 minutes of the movie is good. You can tell that the actors in the movie are talented. The emotion, the feeling is good. But the plot is awful. This movies does not have a plot. A mother dies and the children has to share what is left. There is no drama. Only one side story that tells, the grand child smokes pot. There are some few things, where you think, YES now the story steps up. But no, it doesn't happen. The movie was waste of time in every way!This movie, does not want to shock us, it does not want to make a point. It does not want to prove anything. It does not want to teach it, and it does not even want to to entertain us. Greatly disappointed.

evanston_dad Three adult siblings must decide what to do with their mother's house and collection of valuable art after her death in this melancholy but quite lovely film from Olivier Assayas."Summer Hours" really struck a chord with me, because I've just recently begun to see the results of aging in my own parents and am beginning in a real rather than abstract way to prepare myself for a time when I will not have them in my life. The film does wonders at conveying this particular family dynamic with very few moments of outright exposition; the first scene especially, a family gathering while the mother is still alive and wants to inform her children about what to do with her things when she passes, is a marvel of subtle nuances in both the writing and acting that clearly communicates the differences in the relationships between the mother and her three children. The oldest brother doesn't want to think about his mother's death in advance and wants to hold on to things after she's gone; the two younger children, living in different parts of the world, want to be rid of things as quickly and cleanly as possible. Yet the movie doesn't pass judgement on any of them, doesn't treat the oldest brother as a sentimental fool, nor the younger siblings as callously indifferent. It simply acknowledges the complexity of emotions involved in dealing with inanimate objects that represent years of a flesh-and-blood relationship.Grade: A

Roland E. Zwick In the early scenes of "Summer Hours," a 75-year-old French widow (Edith Scob), sensing that the end of her life is at hand, gathers her three adult children and their respective families together at their bucolic ancestral home to celebrate what she believes may be her final birthday. Though a proud mother and a dutiful wife, Helene Bertier has really lived her whole life dedicated to preserving the work and the memory of her uncle, a famous, well-respected painter (there are indications that there may have been more to their relationship than what was apparent on the surface). Two of her three children have scattered to the far-flung corners of the globe - Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) to New York City and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) to China - while the oldest, Frederic (Charles Berling), alone of the three, remains in France. When the day of her passing finally arrives, the three siblings are faced with the universal dilemma of clinging to the past by holding onto the family estate with all the memories it contains or of selling it off and moving on with their lives."Summer Hours" is a beautifully realized film that captures the truths of familial relationships in subtle and knowing terms. The film has an unforced, spontaneous feel to it, due in large part to the lack of contrived plotting, the lifelike dialogue, the understated performances and the spontaneous, naturalistic style of film-making director Olivier Assayas has employed in service of the material. Though very little "happens" in the conventional narrative sense of the term, the film is never static because Assayas has made the camera an intimate though unobtrusive observer of the scene. We feel as if we are eavesdropping on these people, while, at the same time, becoming deeply involved with their lives and story. Even the conflicts that inevitably arise among the siblings are executed with amazing restraint and precision, completely devoid of the kind of hyperbole and histrionics that seem to blight so many "family dramas."The movie captures the sad reality that sometimes when a person's life is over, all that's left behind to commemorate that life is an assortment of "things," things that come to have less and less value to each succeeding generation as the personal meanings and memories associated with them recede with time. Yet, in the final scene there is a brief but poignant hint that there is still a continuity that runs through the generations, binding them together in shared experience, no matter how tenuous that connection may appear to the casual observer.Superb performances and artful direction make "Summer Hours" a treat in any season.