60
Despite a perfect cast of Resnais regulars plus the master's own impeccable crafting, the characters fail to grip, and with approximately 50 short scenes, development comes in fits and starts.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
I found the interlocking bitterness of Ayckbourn's play irritating and overly neat, and these people don't seem to belong to Paris or London or anywhere else, at least not anytime in the last 20 years.
100
Resnais employs all the tools of studio-bound moviemaking, silent-era to post-modern, in a way that is not only is consistently dazzling in a purely visual sense, but contains an empathy that lifts the picture to tragic heights even at those points at which it seems practically weightless.
100
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Alain Resnais' 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, "Smoking/No Smoking"; that film tried to be as "English" as possible. But this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British culture, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy "Muriel" and "Providence."
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
This is a minor film from a master, which is disappointing, but nevertheless it has its charms, most notably in the acting by a cast of stage and screen veterans.
83
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
The grand old filmmaker frames each scene like a fine painting. And fake snow falls with happy artificiality between rueful vignettes.
80
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous. The role of the artist remains, for Mr. Resnais, the role of a lifetime.
83
Resnais and Ayckbourn care primarily about observing these characters' private and public faces, who they are and who they present themselves as. To that end, they've achieved a mood of enchanting intimacy.
75
Clever, wise and witty.