✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Canada · 1986
Rated R · 1h 41m
Director Denys Arcand
Starring Dominique Michel, Dorothée Berryman, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi
Genre Comedy, Drama
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
Four men and four women, all professors at the University of Montreal, gather for dinner at a country house and discuss their professional, intellectual, and sexual lives. Yet as the conversations continue separately, each of their viewpoints and personal relationships are tested.
Washington Post by Paul Attanasio
From the opening shot, an endless, unmotivated dolly move up a corridor that conveys no information, establishes neither theme nor setting and serves no other purpose, you know that you are in the presence of true film ineptitude, which only deepens as The Decline of the American Empire continues.
Washington Post by Rita Kempley
The Decline of the American Empire is certainly the year's most intellectual work, a frequently funny, unrepressed meditation on midnight in North America. It's the kind of warning you'd expect from a middle-aged, over-educated male, going soft 'round the middle and figuring the world is too.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The movie is wise, deep, and painful, and it is filled with words. Used to be, a "sex film" contained lots of nudity and steamy scenes. That kind of stuff would just slow this one down.
With nothing at stake dramatically, much less cinematically, Arcand leans heavily on brow-raising repartee to carry the load, but his naked contempt throws a wet blanket over all the frank sexual anecdotes and observations.
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
Mr. Arcand's dialogue is not didactic. It's spontaneously funny and rueful and full of oblique revelations. Though highly intelligent, his characters are prone to self-delusion. They're nothing if not civilized, but they don't hesitate to lie and cheat in their own interests.
Soon the hunt will begin.
A man, thoroughly dissatisfied with his life, finds new meaning when he forms a fight club with soap salesman Tyler Durden.
At a Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed.
You've never really thought about the expression bare-it-all until you've seen this.
A provocative new comedy about sex, friendship, and all other things that invade our lives.
Three guys. One pub. Too much time on their hands.
The search began at the opening of their mother's will.
After accidentally taking his friend's notebook, an 8-year-old boy sets out to return it.
A Frenchman weds an Asian woman to become a U.S. citizen to be near his kids in Manhattan.
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing.
A young gay man determined to reinvent his life leaves everything behind on his quest for self-realization.