60
It's impossible not to be sucked into, but it's equally impossible not to imagine how much more significant No Home Movie might have been.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
Since from her other features it is clear she's an uncompromising director, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this film is as unapologetically personal and self-absorbed as it is, making no attempt to draw in viewers perhaps unfamiliar with the filmmaker.
88
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.
91
The Film Stage by Ethan Vestby
Removed from anything resembling ostentatious formalism, it fits into what’s typically referred to by cinephiles as a “late master” period, in which the auteur has dropped all pretenses and adapted a full-on laid-back, emotionally direct directorial hand.
58
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Though No Home Movie is a very personal work by someone who was always a deeply personal artist, it’s hard to tune into. It contains a lot of Akerman, but very little of her art, and that seems intentional.
90
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
If you let it, No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.
70
In its own highbrow way, the formally demanding and impossibly intimate video essay serves as an elegy to that sense of home that disappeared with the woman who, as far as the film is concerned, seems forever confined to her own bourgeois apartment.
100
The rest of the film consists mostly of Akerman talking with her mother, blithely and lovingly, about everyday ephemera and about the past (Natalia was a survivor of Auschwitz), both via Skype and at her mother’s genteel home in Brussels.
70
Los Angeles Times by Sheri Linden
With its focus on domestic interiors (and interior lives), the movie doesn't simply recall Akerman's past efforts; it reveals their roots.
90
Time Out London by Tom Huddleston
The word "personal" is bandied around a lot in film reviews, but it’s hard to think of a work that better fits the description than avant-garde icon Chantal Akerman’s intimate swansong No Home Movie.