Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
The film is further confirmation of Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately devastating ear and touch as a filmmaker.
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Germany · 2016
Rated PG-13 · 1h 42m
Director Mia Hansen-Løve
Starring Isabelle Huppert, André Marcon, Edith Scob, Roman Kolinka
Genre Drama
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
Nathalie is a passionate teacher of philosophy at a high school in Paris. Married with two children, her life is comfortably divided between family, work, and spending time with her mother. Yet, suddenly, every comfort becomes a challenge. With her once balanced life in utter disarray, Nathalie must forge a new path for herself.
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
The film is further confirmation of Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately devastating ear and touch as a filmmaker.
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
Cat lovers (and possibly fans of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) will appreciate the role of an ageing black feline as a symbol of the sudden changes in Nathalie’s life. Everyone else should warm to the way that Hansen-Løve distils the chaos of life and the life of the mind into such a warm, thoughtful, surprising drama.
Things to Come may lack the urgency or cool that flecks the writer-director’s previous movies, but this is perhaps her richest piece to date, a warm, funny and profoundly sensitive portrait of letting go and learning to make new memories.
The Film Stage by Giovanni Marchini Camia
While Hansen-Løve certainly deserves credit for writing such a compelling character, it’s difficult to imagine anyone realizing Nathalie as consummately as Huppert, who, even by her exceptionally high standards, pulls off a superlative performance.
Huppert is such a persistently and prolifically rigorous performer that she risks being taken for granted in some of her vehicles, but this is major, many-shaded work even by her lofty standards.
Things to Come is a smart, earnest undertaking: an exploration of the insecurity that can hit any of us, at any age, when we start to question the life we’ve built.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
The film’s shrewd sense of humor, its way of underlining the absurdity of life’s foibles, is fully carried by Huppert’s disarming performance, which never panders to easy sentiments but doesn’t shy away from showcasing raw emotion.
A fluent, confident and deeply felt work by an astute chronicler of life, Things to Come considers the fragility of ideas when exposed to the eroding force of time in beautifully humane fashion.
Hansen-Løve and Huppert cup a single life in their hands and ponder the mixed blessing of freedom from a philosophical position: the trade-off between self-sufficiency and aloneness that Nathalie finds herself negotiating.
Screen International by Wendy Ide
It’s to the credit of Isabelle Huppert, who excels in the role of philosophy teacher Nathalie, and to the deft handling by Hansen-Løve that the film wears its wealth of ideas so lightly.
The survival of a young boy in Byelorussia amidst the brutal chaos of WWII is a contest between despair and hope.
Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave.
Adèle's life changes completely when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair.
A self-diagnosed nymphomaniac recounts the erotic story of her adolescence and young adulthood.
A man returns home after 12 years to tell his family that he is dying.
After being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver finds himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail.
We all need somebody to lean on.
After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, a mother seeks justice.
A week in the life of a working-class poet named Paterson and his partner Laura—a DIY creative force—as they find inspiration through their daily activities and modest means.
Bumbling inspectors Machin and Malfoy investigate the mysterious disappearances of several tourists on the beautiful beaches of Slack Bay.
When his mother takes in a bully whose own mother is ill, Damien must learn to live with the boy who terrorized him.
A young woman grieving the death of her fiancé meets a mysterious French man who's visiting her fiancé's grave.