Incendies

To be honest, there is nothing left to say story-wise after this film. The tragedy, atmosphere and everything...

As an admirer of Dennis Villeneuve's filmography thanks to his work in past years, I was already familiar with how much of a brilliant storyteller he is. Yet, Incendies is no different. Beautifully structured script, visuals, soundtrack...

Lastly, the intro, along with Radiohead's "You and Whose Army?" is probably the one of the best I've ever witnessed easily.

Purely marvelous. Life like. I almost fell asleep in the beginning. After 20 min, till the last 15min, was pure suspense.

Denis Villeneuve has created nothing less than a masterpiece. This film is revealing a great Director, especially when given an original story with such powerful dimensions.

Despite being skeptical as first of the film being shot in Jordan, when dealing with the very specific, multidimensional Lebanese drama, the geographic distance with the land of Lebanon is detaching the film from the strict reality of the place and taking it to whole other level of significance. Jordan's landscape especially with the film's photography, are somewhat surrealistic, as if the story was taking place in a deep level of the region's sub-conscious.

Villeneuve has managed to delicately craft a story with dimensions that a human mind in its normal condition is not prepared to understand and confront. And yet these things did happen, many times during the war and retelling them is a very not an easy task. Actually a quasi impossible one and yet Villeneuve did it.

This has to be the film representing Canada at the Oscars. And it will win.

This film is extraordinary on just about every level. The script is terrific, the actors are perfect, the direction and cinematography are all you could hope for. I recommend it without hesitation.

Anyone who has seen any of Villeneuve's previous work--or Andre Turpin's Zigrail--knows that these filmmakers have bodies of work that are almost without peer in contemporary cinema world-wide and are unparallelled in the history of Canadian cinema (until seeing Incendies, Maelstrom was my favourite Canadian film). Incendies does not betray that "legacy". You should absolutely see it.

In a film as stunning as this one it's odd to single out one aspect, but I must say that Lubna Azabal's performance is among the best I've ever seen. Though I've watched a few films that she's been in in the past, she never really stood out for me. She is devastatingly good in this picture.

I do hope that this film gets submitted to the AMPAS for Oscar selection as it is definitely the best film I've seen this year and a shoe-in for the foreign picture Oscar.

My only complaint about the film was the use of music by Radiohead, which took me out of the film each time it played. The rest of the music cues were spot-on and quite excellent, but Thom Yorke's voice belonged nowhere near this film.

I saw a suggestion online to watch this movie without knowing anything about it, so that's what I did. It's great and that was great advice.

The overall story is about two siblings fulfilling their mothers last wishes.

At times you don't always know what is going on or quite get given all the details, Villeneuve leaves the viewer to figure out a few pieces or eliminate the areas of confusion and your attention to this doesn't go unrewarded. This is a nice change from the spoon-fed Hollywood movies that we are often used to.

So many Hollywood movies you can see the whole plot arc or take a pretty accurate guess in the first 15 minutes of the film, that's not the case with Incendies.

Great film and worth a watch.