Metacritic-Rezensionen

Guediguian's seemingly sprawling but in fact quite precise picture takes a while to establish itself, but is eventually rewarding viewing.

Intimate and human yet deeply ambitious, a powerhouse of a film made with a disturbing vision.

Fumbling characters find that survival is not a matter of economics alone, it's also a matter of hope.

Leaves you reeling from the force of the humanity it captures and -- in its own gut-wrenching way -- honors.

The sense of loneliness and disaffection makes its effect. Guédiguian offers no answers, and the hope he supplies is almost surreal.

The movie may not be as toxic and ultimately hopeless as Todd Solondz's "Happiness," but it also fails to find humor, dark or light, in anything.

It doesn't quite wash. Guédiguian has a telling instinct for the buried shame of working-class squalor, but his film is inflated with a doom that feels programmatic rather than earned.

Some of the film's situations and motivations seem convenient or underdeveloped, but Ascaride and Darroussin are riveting, and Guediguian's frankness and empathy illuminate this kaleidoscope of lonely lives.

The challenge faced here by writer-director Robert Guédiguian (Charge!) is to keep his cheap melodrama from curdling his insightful societal appraisal.

The last-minute combination of Greek tragedy and Janis Joplin is so genuinely startling that, had the movie been shorted by a third, it might have turned everything around.