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Let us use the arrival of "Le Week-End"—a wistfully rendered yet often barbed account of longtime marrieds who find themselves dissatisfied and drifting apart while on an anniversary trip to Paris—to salute a filmmaker who rarely gets the credit he deserves: Roger Michell .

At 57, Michell is the youngest and most unsung of a trio of distinctively British directors whose film work began receiving global attention in the '90s. Mike Newell made his presence known with 1994's "Four Weddings and a Funeral", scoring Oscar nods for best picture and screenplay. John Madden topped that feat with 1998's " Shakespeare in Love ", winning seven Oscars including best picture. Michell's breakout arrived in 1999, when his romantic comedy " Notting Hill " turned into one of the highest-grossing British films of all time with a worldwide box office of $364 million. His involvement, however, was somewhat overshadowed by the sight of Julia Roberts playing a version of herself as a renowned actress opposite a smitten Hugh Grant . While there have been other hits among Michell's 11 films—his first, an adaptation of Jane Austen's " Persuasion " in 1995, was a well-received TV movie released in theaters overseas—there also have been notable misses.

Most recently, his " Hyde Park on Hudson " was done in by the unpalatable displays of FDR's extracurricular love life. But the biopic at least succeeded on a smaller scale as an intriguing private portrait of a public marriage. Specifically, that of an insecure King George VI ( Samuel West ), the stutterer who was the subject of " The King's Speech ", and his nagging wife ( Olivia Colman ), the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, as they visited the president's upstate New York retreat as World War II threatens. That royal gem of a union, as well as the interplay between West's King and Bill Murray's FDR, managed to save the show.

As exemplified by that effort as well as 2002's " Changing Lanes ", a road-rage drama, and 2006's "Venus", about an aged actor who lusts after an insolent young woman, Michell is often at his best when dealing with characters who find themselves under stress or attempting to seek common ground with an onscreen counterpart. When Michell is on his game, as he definitely is with "Le Week-End", he unearths small, invaluable and even profound truths about the human condition that are often as inspiring as they are devastating.

Michell also has great taste in collaborators. "Le Week-End" marks his fourth pairing with screenwriter Hanif Kureishi —they managed to earn the late Peter O'Toole his eighth and final shot at an acting Oscar with "Venus". Similarly, they find themselves working alongside two durable acting pros with notable depth and presence, owlishly avuncular Jim Broadbent , 64, who won an Oscar as the caretaker husband in " Iris ", and bewitchingly flinty Lindsay Duncan , 63, who was fabulous as the eccentric mum in " About Time ". Simple stereotypes are not what these two performers do.

Yet their domestic situation will be recognizable to anyone who has savored the comfortable familiarity that comes with a decades-long union but also has resented its predictability. With performers this seasoned, all it takes is the opening scene aboard a train to see where this journey to re-invigorate 30-year marriage is going. Meg has her nose in a book while trying to ignore Nick, who is checking over itineraries and other travel material while worrying about where he stashed their converted Euros.

Duncan's likeness to French actress Julie Delpy isn't the only reason that it is easy to think of "Le Week-End" as a twilight time version of Richard Linklater's " Before Midnight " and its two romantic predecessors. They all offer long, often intense verbal exchanges between partners in a relationship against a glorious scenic backdrop.

Once the couple arrives at their destination, the conversation initially turns comedic when Meg takes one look at the depressing cut-rate dump of a room that Nick has booked and observes with disgust, "It's beige!'' Off they go in cab to a high-end hotel complete with Eiffel Tower view and a fully stocked pricey mini-bar. Told that Tony Blair once stayed in their suite, Nick opines, "As long as they changed the sheets."

Where she is bold, decisive, impractical and reckless, he is fussy, clumsy, fretful and tentative. He wants to use this occasion to finally nail down what tiles to put in their redone bathroom. She hungers for fine food, great wine and excitement beyond the everyday norm.

Given they are both academics—Nick is a philosophy professor, no less—the talk gushes forth as they visit picturesque museums, bistros, book shops, churches and cemeteries. They argue about their wastrel son who wants to move back home. Nick reveals he is about to be pushed into early retirement at work. Meg tops that news with the admission that she has considered spending her golden years without him. As hurtful as she can be and as vulnerable as he can be, Broadbent and Duncan make sure that flickers of love and affection ignite now and then in between spats over having to use the same toothbrush.

Sex, of course, rears its head. And rather bluntly, too. As Nick, who is clearly hoping to get lucky on this jaunt, notes, "For the last five, 10 years, your vagina has become sort of a closed book." He then suggests taking their lovemaking "into another dimension," even suggesting they pretend to be other people.

Counters Meg, "I might do it for you later if you stay awake." She teases him in cruel fashion until he retreats, listening to Bob Dylan in boxer shorts with his ear buds in, and guzzling alcohol. They do make fine co-conspirators, however, as Meg pulls off a scheme to skip out of paying a steep bill at a restaurant and they passionately kiss on the street in celebration.

The climax of the movie arrives when Nick runs into a pal, a well-off American author named Morgan who now lives in Paris with his new pregnant wife. As played by Jeff Goldblum at his most grand-gesturing Goldblum-iest, his entrance into the movie is akin to throwing a lit Roman candle into a room. It's at a dinner party in honor of Morgan's latest tome that Nick and Meg go off on their own little adventures of self-discovery, and leave perhaps with a renewed commitment. Or maybe not. In any case, the final images suggested by a Godard movie will put a smile on your face and at least provide hope.

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

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Film credits.

Le Week-End (2014)

Jim Broadbent as Nick Burrows

Lindsay Duncan as Meg Burrows

Jeff Goldblum as Morgan

Olly Alexander as Michael

Sophie- Charlotte Husson as Plaza's Receptionist

Brice Beaugier as Robert

Xavier De Guillebon as Jean-Pierre Degremont

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Denis Sebbah as Christopher Aragues

• Roger Michell
• Hanif Kureishi

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• Nathalie Durand

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Edelstein on Le Week-End : Unbelievably Marvelous, in Light of Its Depressing Trajectory

Le Week-End is a marital ­disintegration–reintegration drama that opens with a dose of frost and vinegar and turns believably sweet—and unbelievably marvelous, in light of what had seemed a depressing trajectory. Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play an aging, not-affluent British couple grabbing a fast weekend in Paris. Their tatty hotel appalls her so much she impulsively checks into a luxury one—which appalls her husband, who has yet to reveal he was forced to resign his professorship over a run-in with a student. He would like to touch her, but she quivers with displeasure when he tries. (“I’m a phobic object,” he concludes.) The not-so-sub subtext is that love doesn’t last. She sees his weakness and inability to get out of himself and truly care for her; he sees a still-beautiful woman who’s moving beyond his grasp.

Hanif Kureishi wrote it, Roger Michell directed; they collaborated on the creepy drama The Mother, and neither is a squishy humanist. But they’re working with actors whose firm masks yield glimpses of desperate, capacious souls. Jeremy Sams’s modest jazz score takes the edge off the severity, mellows it, signals a middle ground between hope and despair.

The wild card of Le Week-end is the guy they bump into: the superb Jeff Goldblum (as a solicitous American academic with enviable crossover success). At first he seems creepily intimate, a phony. Gradually you realize he’s just madly ­insecure—a Goldblum-esque blurter. At a party, they meet his young second wife, for whom he’s unsuited, and a son from a first marriage whom he loves but barely knows. They see what pathetic, lucky souls they are. I don’t know how Kureishi pulled the last act out of his hat. But then, true artists don’t always know where the magic comes from, either.

*This article appeared in the March 10, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

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Le Week-End Review

11 Oct 2013

Le Week-End

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan are a couple of one-time radicals on a 30th-anniversary second honeymoon in Paris, where the lifelong tensions between his avuncular denialism and her prickly impetuousness snap dramatically, and humorously. Intentionally or not, the film smacks of an attempt to capture a youthful, indie style the oldieweds themselves crave to rediscover, giving it a clumsy, puppyish feel — like an Exotic Mumblecore Hotel. But despite that it is never unappealing, thanks to a Jeff Goldblum cameo and some compelling verbal swordplay between Broadbent and Duncan.

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Le Week-End | reviews, news & interviews

Le week-end, latest roger michell/hanif kureishi collaboration is grown-up, touching, and gently gallic.

One of the joys of autumn is the seasonal return to films about - and intended for - grown-ups, and movies don't come much more crisply and buoyantly adult than Le Week-End, at once the latest and best from the director/writer team of Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi. The abundant wisdom of the pair's third screen collaboration within 10 years surely reflects the growing awareness that comes with age of the derailments, large and small, that lie scattered along life's way.

But whereas one might expect a gathering dourness from this excavation of marital fissures as they are laid bare during a Birmingham couple's anniversary weekend in France, the film benefits from a glancing whimsy that is itself definably Gallic: it's as if the very presence of Paris has put a spring in everyone's step (a condition to which Woody Allen of late would clearly relate), leaving its blissful trio of stars to do the rest. And, zut alors , do they ever.  

Maybe but just as possibly not, given the intermingling of opposites that for some while, one senses, has kept this marriage on track. "You can't not love and hate the same person," Nick decides, some time before he twice praises Meg as "hot" only to add the words "but cold" immediately after. The film is startlingly alert to the Janus-faced qualities of desire and desperation, and its neatly structured narrative gets a fillip from the introduction of a spry, wry Jeff Goldblum in prime form as Morgan, an old Cambridge pal of Nick's who has effected his own escape to Paris with a much younger, and pregnant, wife.

Duncan is every bit as remarkable as the comparatively self-contained Meg, a tougher role in that this spoken embodiment of "melting ice" threatens to lob sympathy firmly in Nick's court: to that extent, one can tell that this is a movie made by men. On the other hand, it's difficult not to share Meg's exasperation at Nick's multiple deceptions, and Duncan's silken severity seems just the right complement to Broadbent's open-faced bewilderment mixed with alarm. Some might assume there to be no exit for this couple, to cite a Frenchman who goes unacknowledged here. But as an  hommage -laden final scene suggests, lacerations can perhaps give way to levity as well. Here's betting that Nick and Meg trade in their return train ticket for many an aperitif at the  Café de Flore.

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Le Week-End Review

Caught somewhere between the dialogue-rich, European snapshots of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy and the deep humanism and leisurely beats of a Mike Leigh drama, Le Week-End is a splendid, albeit salty look at two septuagenarians spending a few days in Paris to mark their 30th anniversary. The man is Nick Burrows (Jim Broadbent), a weary college professor recently sacked from his teaching post. The woman is Meg (Lindsay Duncan), who wants to retreat from her dogged husband and find her own freedom. The couple ventures through the City of Love over three days of happiness and misery, as we wonder how their love will end up – faded away or reinvigorated?

Nick is still deeply in love with Meg, who has aged gracefully and has not lost the vigor or figure of a much younger woman. She knows that she controls him with an icy grip and that he will concede to let her have moments of spontaneous fun. Meg wants the trip to be a special time for her – perhaps she can start making an effort to learn a new language. However, Nick wants them to get time together and rekindle some of the spark they had when they visited Paris over their honeymoon decades earlier. The first sip of the Burrows’ life was intoxicating, but now they’re reaching the end of the bottle many years later, when the drink is not as tasty.

With every small turn or decision, there is a larger reaction from the opposite party. At Le Week-End ’s start, Nick has booked a modest hotel, but Meg is disgruntled by the beige colour of the room and having to lug her suitcase up a flight of stairs. To cope with her hubby’s thriftiness, she runs out into a taxi and flees to accommodations that are more lavish, a suite with a stunning, sparkling view of the Eiffel Tower. In the first ten minutes, we get a revealing glimpse at the incompatibility of this relationship between the firm, fussy Meg and the humble, wearied Nick.

Le Week-End , which marks the fourth collaboration between director Roger Michell ( Notting Hill ) and playwright Hanif Kureishi ( My Beautiful Laundrette ), has a wildly shifting tone. It works though, since the couple’s married life is filled with equal parts joy and bitterness, and exchanges both sweet and sour. A few moments after Meg proposes a divorce, Nick and her are hopping through the avenues before stopping for an arresting kiss that draws some whistles from passersby. Later, when she seduces him with the promise of sex, it is cut short when he infers that she is having an affair.

Between Michell’s film and 2013’s Before Midnight , hotel suites are the new go-to location for marital bliss turning on itself in cinema. Like that drama, there are also a handful of one-take scenes, which Nathalie Durand films with an assured hand. In addition, Jeff Goldblum makes a brief but memorable appearance as Morgan, an old friend of Nick’s, who invites him to a small party at his Paris loft. Morgan has reaped success as a journalist and author and Goldblum’s always animated nature makes him a terrific foil for the flustered Nick.

The film’s shifting moods, spurred by the characters and Kureishi’s ping-pong dialogue (full of prickly one-liners and heartfelt speeches), could have felt uneven without such terrific talent. Thankfully, both leads are fantastic here.

Broadbent is one of the most reliable English actors of the last several years and his turn here is a career highlight. As Nick, he drags the feelings of regret and wanting on his face. He stares frequently as his more youthful wife, still in awe of her beauty if not her lack of grace. “You’re hot,” he tells her. “Hot but cold.” His eyes are hungry, but his hands are hesitant. In a speech late in the film, he tears into his mopey state to prove to his wife how much she means to him, and it is hard to think of another actor who could deliver such cutting lines with such a drained demeanor yet still exhibit such colourful emotion.

Duncan is also masterful, trying to cling on to the shreds of that fiery passion she once possessed – although this would mean letting go of her demure husband. She varies from exuberance when opening the suite’s mini-bar fridge to averting his longing gaze when he tries to initiate sex a few moments later. The actress is spiteful yet never unsympathetic, and she uses the script’s sly tongue to her advantage. “You are the postman who never knocks. I’m not sure you’ve got any balls,” she spits at her hubby. Meg wants to roam freely around the city, with the vibrancy and passion featured in French New Wave cinema (Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part appears on their hotel television, and she will later re-create one of that film’s iconic scenes.) Michell also must love French films, as he shows the bouncy freedoms of Parisian life in tightly edited, fast-paced scenes of the couple running through the city streets.

It may not be anything revolutionary, or do anything drastic for the genre, but as an intimate, deeply moving, sharply written drama about two people falling in and out of love,  Le Week-End is a terrific placeholder until Hawke and Delpy grace the screens again.

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Review: le week-end.

Both keenly calculated and flowing with offbeat, naturalistic detail, Hanif Kureishi’s jewel of a script reflects his sensibilities as a playwright.

“You can’t not love and hate the same person,” says British sexagenarian Nick Burrows (Jim Broadbent), “usually within the space of five minutes, in my experience.” The sentiment is one Nick imparts to his wife, Meg (Lindsay Duncan), with whom he’s vacationing in Paris for the couple’s 30th wedding anniversary, and it encapsulates the way the lovely and unapologetic Le Week-End operates. Bound to draw countless comparisons to the highly similar Before Midnight , the film, which marks the fourth collaboration between director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi, explores the bittersweet and largely unglamorized happenings of a long-term relationship, bringing to light, amid a jaunt in a foreign country, two lovers’ ingrained and shared understandings, whose specificity achieves a surprising universality. Finally free of a grown hanger-on of a son, the vacationing duo find their golden-year freedom stirring up fears of loss, identity, and inadequacy, and their rapport is a constant toggle between warm codependence and button-pushing spats. Both keenly calculated and flowing with offbeat, naturalistic detail, Kureishi’s jewel of a script reflects his sensibilities as a playwright, and like Before Midnight , Le Week-End often unfolds like filmic theater, with potential contrivances of language being transcended by its honesty and the ace actors tasked to relay it.

And yet, it’s also what isn’t said that reveals the details of Nick and Meg’s union. After booking a suite, at Meg’s request, in a tony hotel they can’t afford (she’s a modestly paid teacher; he’s a professor facing unemployment), Meg tells Nick of all the things she suddenly wants to do, like learn Italian to match her gorgeously fluent French, and he convincingly infers that she’s proposing a divorce. Cut to the next scene and the two are stealthily skipping the check, then running gleefully through the street like a pair of mischievous puppy-lovers. At night, while Meg sleeps, Nick relishes his time alone, making collages and listening to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” whose lyric “How does it feel…” is graciously cut short by the film, clipped before it proceeds with the dead-on inquiry “…to be on your own?” Then Meg wakes in panic, and after an evening of coyishly denying Nick’s sexual advances (“Just a sniff,” Nick beckons at Meg’s vagina in the film’s boldest age-defying moment), she breathes relief when she finds him, ignoring his response to her fears of his departure (“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Nick says).

All of this choreographed yet unaffectledly resonant emotional ping-ponging, which Broadbent and Duncan brilliantly, respectively play with boyish devotion and rich austerity, leads to a climactic dinner party at the home of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), a successful author and former Cambridge classmate of Nick’s, whom the Burrowses happen upon in what must be one of Goldblum’s greatest on-screen scenes. Roaming a marketplace while alternately shooting barbs and sharing compliments (“You make my blood boil like no one else,” Meg says; “That’s the sign of a deep connection!” Nick retorts), the couple encounters Morgan, who immediately waxes ecstatic like the planet’s most charismatic prick, lauding his long, lost peer and kissing Meg’s hand while extending, along with the party invitation, a seemingly boundless comic-snob demeanor (Goldblum wields Morgan’s overwrought words as sexily and effortlessly as he wears his designer clothes). Just before the party, Meg is at Nick’s throat over the accusation of a past affair, but as they enter, she begs him not to leave her side. He does, and the film uses the opportunity to give both partners glimpses of being unwed. Meg is hit on by a younger French intellectual, while Nick has a powwow with Morgan, who proves a horrifying reflection of what Nick’s life might be like without his wife, right down to unchecked open-mouth chewing, an act for which Meg often chides him.

The cautionary motives for these exchanges aren’t exactly subtle, and like Before Midnight , Le Week-End ’s least effective scene involves a well-populated dinner table, where Nick’s gut-spilling speech about life, love, and work feels like forced catharsis—a place to which the movie was pushed instead of where it organically arrived. But such is the rare low in a dramedy that’s brimming with highs, and that thankfully breaks the streak of bad-to-worse films about and starring senior citizens. Following the woeful Morning Glory and Hyde Park on Hudson , Le Week-End is also a considerable rebound for Michell, who, working with French cinematographer Nathalie Durand, offers compositions that complement Nick and Meg’s perpetually two-sided bond. As the couple approaches a Parisian museum, snapping at each other while intermittently giggling, they’re dwarfed while the whole building is captured in wide shot, and promising sunlight beams in a corner as dead autumn leaves scurry across the ground. And at the party and also afterward, Michell lines the bottom of his frame with out-of-focus candle flames, which seem to symbolically evolve with Nick and Meg’s fluctuating love, capable of being snuffed at any moment while also refusing to burn out.

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REVIEW: “Le Week-End”

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play Nick and Meg Burrows. In light of their 30th wedding anniversary, the couple takes off to Paris, France – the place of their honeymoon. It doesn’t take long for us to see that their marriage is on life support and Nick especially hopes this trip will resuscitate it. Years of pent-up emotion and complex feelings boil to the surface and Nick and Meg try to navigate the waves the best way they know how.

“Le Week-End” isn’t a formulaic run-of-the-mill couples drama. It has a very grounded sensibility and its approach to storytelling is unique. Much like the struggling relationship it depicts, “Le Week-End” features a number of mood shifts and knotty emotional moments. There is a stinging realism to Nick and Meg’s relationship that separates the film from most other movies of this type. The movie also moves at a fairly slow pace and there are moments where nothing much happens. That’s not always a problem but there are times where it works against the picture.

I can certainly appreciate the deliberate pace and the occasional idling that we get throughout the film. On the other hand, there were times when I really wanted the movie to kick into another gear. The very thing that sets it apart from other movies of this type is the same thing that kept me from truly loving the film. I also left with a number of questions that the ending never answered or hinted at. It’s not that it is a terrible ending, but I can’t say it was all that satisfying.

I can say that Broadbent and Duncan were extraordinary. Both are seasoned performers and their chemistry is spot-on. The way they develop their characters and expose their flaws and frustrations is nearly flawless. Even when the script shortchanges them (and there are a small handful of weird moments), Broadbent and Duncan rise above the material. I also really liked seeing Jeff Goldblum appear as an old acquaintance of Nick’s. He is a fine actor who I believe always adds good moments to a film.

While “Le Week-End” may not be the brilliant film I was hoping for, it’s still an easy movie to recommend. It makes pretty good use of one of the most beautiful cities in the world and the story of Nick and Meg is certainly an interesting one. But I really hoped that Michell would pull more from this magical setting and that Kureishi would give his performers more fluid material. But even these issues can be overlooked to a degree. “Le Week-End” strives to give us a movie that bucks convention and it puts two truly strong performances in front of us. Those are things I can certainly appreciate.

VERDICT – 3.5 STARS

Share this:, 17 thoughts on “ review: “le week-end” ”.

Have had the opportunity to go to a press screening of this, but did not have the time to go. Looks like a fun movie to watch.

I remember someone making the remark looking at those pictures that it was of a future installment of the “Before…” trilogy. They do look similar to Jesse and Celine 😉

That’s very interesting. I didn’t really think about that. Now that you mention it I can see some of the similarities although this one does go more for dramatic effect. It doesn’t always work but as a whole it’s a good film.

Nice review Keith. I’d really like to see this one.

It’s a good movie. Unfortunately it’s not that great film that I was hoping for. Still it’s definitely worth your time.

Nicely done sir! I’m a fan of Broadbent so I’d definitely be up for seeing this one.

Broadbent is really good, isn’t he? I think the ingredients were here for a truly great movie. That said, we still get a really good one and it’s worth checking out my friend.

Nice review Keith. Has this just come out in the US? I remember it being in cinemas here last year and I thought about it but didn’t bother in the end. I’ll try and catch it as I’m intrigued by what you say about the performances. Completely agree about Goldblum by the way!

Yes sir, it has just now opened in select theaters around the states. I have had my eye on it for a while. It really appealed to me. It wasn’t quite as good as I hoped but it’s still very entertaining and it features such great performances.

I like Jim Broadbent but the last indie drama I saw him in, Another Year, bored me to tears. I’m curious about this one as I also like Lindsay Duncan, so I might rent it but w/ neutral expectation.

Oh I loved Another Year. I thought it was a hoot. It definitely was slow and had a lot of chatting, but I loved watching this older couple and how their steady lives influenced all the others around them.

Broadbent and Duncan really do create a lovely chemistry between these two that makes it feel like they truly have been married forever and are getting way tired of it. Because of them and what they do together, the movie totally works. Good review.

Thanks man. I agree, the two leads are the big reason this works. They are really good.

Nice review, Keith. I’m a fan of all three actors and an above-average film is perfect for home viewing when I’m in between projects and writing. Not mention, it’s filmed in Paris 🙂

Yes! I did think it may use Paris a little more than it did but still you can’t beat that city as a setting! 🙂

Strong review Keith. Just saw this about a week ago actually and still haven’t been able to post up my analysis of it. I’m torn between thinking it was too-standoff-ish and being a perfect film. I’m really not sure what it is.

I do have to say, though. I’m very curious about the disparity between the Critic and Audience ratings on RT. It’s really bizarre. If anything, i would have thought it would be the other way around.

I noticed that as well. To a degree the critics score didn’t surprise me. I did expect a better reaction from audiences. On the other hand the film does stay away from many of the standard audience-pleasing gimmicks. That may have hurt it with some viewers.

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Home » Review » Movie » Le Week-End

Le Week-End

Romance and excitement aren't just for teenagers and 20-somethings

If the success of films such as  The Best Exotic Marigold , Hotel , Quartet , and Philomena have proven anything, it’s that there is certainly an audience for films with older ensembles. One that perhaps isn’t being fully served. Romance and excitement aren’t just for teenagers and 20-somethings, and even though Hollywood may be a young person’s game, there’s clearly a desire for movies with elderly protagonists, too.

Thus, we have Le Week-End , a charming and comedic drama about an older couple, Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan), who travel to Paris for the first time since their honeymoon. Managing to pack in what feels like a month’s worth of mishaps into the span of one weekend, they struggle to relate to the locals, an old friend they run into (played by Jeff Goldblum), and each other.

However, Le Week-End wisely avoids relying on the tired “aren’t-old-people- kooky? ” tropes that some films of this type resort to. Nick and Meg aren’t presented as figures to laugh at, and even though they aren’t always likeable characters, their struggles and frustrations feel earned. Director Roger Michell seems more interested in exploring the intricacies of how people relate to each other rather than aiming for more standard cinematic moments of revelation.

Along those lines, I appreciated how unflinchingly the conflicts in Nick and Meg’s relationship are presented; their conversations frequently turn from charming banter to petty bickering with no apparent explanation, yet it feels natural. Nick and Meg say some truly horrible things to each other at times, but it’s understood that this is simply how the couple operate and that they can easily bounce back.

Much of this understanding is thanks to the nuanced performances from both Broadbent and Duncan. Broadbent has long been a beloved stalwart of British cinema, and his performance in Le Week-End is every bit as charming and befuddled as you’d expect. However, it’s Duncan who truly steals the movie. She’s an actress who has appeared in many films and television shows, but often in supporting roles (see: About Time , Alice in Wonderland , etc.), so it’s a treat to see her get a character she can really sink her teeth into. Meg is a fascinating and complex woman, and Duncan effortlessly portrays a woman who Nick is both endlessly exasperated by and hopelessly in love with.

All of this said, Le Week-End does suffer a bit due to its light tone. There is a weight to the central relationship, and the movie does wade into some surprisingly complicated emotional territory, but it still always seems like the movie is hedging its bets a touch; even at Nick and Meg’s most dire moments of conflict, it feels as though their reconciliation is inevitable. Early on, it’s established that these people need each other and are willing to overlook a lot in one another, so the moments of tension or temptation that come later seem more like temporary bumps in their relationship rather than foundation-shaking reverberations.

Luckily, though, the performances are good enough and there’s just enough honesty in the screenplay to make Le Week-End an overall success. The film’s portrayal of everyday conversations and emphasis on travel call to mind the Before series, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Nick and Meg as Jesse and Celine a couple of franchise installments down the line. And, as is the case with Linklater’s films, the viewer’s enjoyment doesn’t come from following the simplistic plot, but rather from watching a small slice of life play out. There are a couple of standout scenes – in particular, a dinner table monologue from Broadbent later on – that cut surprisingly deep with stark honesty.

This is a movie that wins by letting its characters be complicated and messy. It’s occasionally a touch too twee for its own good, but as the credits began to roll, I found myself surprised by how much of the film had left a quiet impact on me.

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Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan are plummy perfection as a British pair in their 60s who hope to reenergize their marriage with a trip to Paris. But the vacation winds up deepening their differences, especially in terms of intimacy (she’s turned off, he’s plaintively hooked on her). Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, who wrote of youthful passion in “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” is just as adept at late-in-life romantic dissection.

Director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill,” “Hyde Park on Hudson”) showcases the great Broadbent’s cantankerous side as well as his avuncular charm, and Duncan’s provocative sophistication should make Helen Mirren up her game. Plus, Jeff Goldblum, as a university pal of Broadbent’s, does his ever-watchable Goldblum thing. His character is the antithesis of the film’s conflicted couple. Together, they all anchor a smart, ardent, profound movie. Joe Neumaier

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Film of the Week: Le Week-End

By Jonathan Romney on October 30, 2013

I honestly can't remember seeing a more off-putting trailer than the one for Le Week-End . It features Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan flitting around the streets of Paris, lashings of breezy accordion, and then the stars—with Jeff Goldblum, and with Duncan in an amusing hat—imitating the Madison dance from Godard’s Band of Outsiders . It all suggests excruciating whimsy, a coy entertainment for Francophile viewers d'un certain âge —people, perhaps, like Duncan's character Meg Burrows, whose choice of reading on the Eurostar is Muriel Barbery's soft-philosophy best-seller The Elegance of the Hedgehog .

In truth, the trailer may not be a radical misrepresentation of Le Week-End , but conversely, it doesn't catch the distinctive blend of jollity and industrial-strength sourness of this latest collaboration between director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi. Over the last decade, Kureishi—once the hip young tearaway of British film and literature—has proved to be an insightful analyst of the discontents of aging, collaborating with Michell on a series of simple, at times austere vignettes that are certainly the director's best films. Le Week-End may seem a light divertissement compared to The Mother (03, about an elderly woman rediscovering sex with a youngish stud—played by Daniel Craig!) and Venus (06, in which an old man, Peter O'Toole, is fixated on a teenager). But Le Week-End 's melancholy and sometimes downright bitter disillusionment are plain to see behind the ooh-la-la veneer.

The story follows a late-middle-aged British couple, Meg and Nick Burrows, celebrating their anniversary with a weekend in Paris. She's a schoolteacher wearily and more or less fondly indulging her husband, often sniping at him with an acidity that suggests her regret at missed romantic opportunities and at her squandered intellectual potential. And he's a career academic beset with nostalgia for the glories that seemed to lie before him in his Cambridge youth; he now faces an ignoble career end, forced to take early retirement.

Oh, well, they'll always have Paris—but dream holidays have a way of bringing out a lifetime's worth of resentment. The pair arrive at their drab Montmartre hotel; Meg recoils at the beige decor and insists on going somewhere fancier. They take a cab, which whizzes them through the city, the Arc de Triomphe wheeling over their heads. For a nasty moment, it feels as if we're in one of Claude Lelouch's more touristic productions—which is the ironic point, since harsh reality quickly elbows glossy fantasy aside. The couple check in at a much fancier establishment, which means a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower and a towering tariff to match. But just as Nick is never quite able to put down the plastic bag he drags around, the couple can't leave behind their home lives. He thinks this is a good time to discuss their bathroom tiles; she can't resist laying her marital discontent on the table.

Being a British film written by a leading novelist/playwright, it's only to be expected that Le Week-End is somewhat talky; at times, the Paris locations come across largely as backdrops for the dialogue. And while the dialogue is pithy, even brutal, the lines aren't always polished zingers: Meg moans about the prospect of his “partially erect sausage”; Nick complains that “over the last five or six years, your vagina has become a closed book.” The repartee can feel creaky as much as brittle, but it does evoke the way an intelligent but intellectually and emotionally exhausted couple might snipe at each other—and the language takes on real vigor as delivered by Broadbent and Duncan.

You absolutely believe in them as a couple. There's no one like Broadbent for looking and sounding flattened by life, and for suggesting a rattlesnake acerbity beneath a soft, amiable exterior; it’s easy to imagine how a man so seemingly affable, yet razor smart, might have attracted a woman like Meg in her no doubt chilly youthful prime. Duncan is astute casting: for all Meg's now comfortable weariness, she has the demeanor of a sexual and intellectual alpha female who's married beneath her, with all the disappointment and barely concealed rage that implies.

Duncan is superb with her weary detachment, mixing a tolerant fondness into the sometimes shockingly overt contempt that Meg shows Nick—although that seems to be part of the tender sadomasochistic bond they share. There's also a curious resonance—perhaps accidental, but eerie nonetheless—for anyone who's recently watched Before Midnight , the third part of Richard Linklater's romantic trilogy, in which the cold truths of marital fatigue came home to roost. Duncan looks uncannily like Julie Delpy 20 years on, and the echoes of the French actress's scathing Céline in Linklater's film bring a fortuitous bonus dimension to Le Week-End .

Things come to a head at a dinner party held by Nick's old Cambridge friend Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), an American academic who's living the Parisian dream. He has a chic apartment, a new glamorous young wife, a prestigious publisher, a gaggle of highbrow friends—and a misguided belief that his English friends must be living a perfect existence. Nick glumly bonds with Morgan's neglected son, a lonesome stoner (Olly Alexander) found listening to Nick Drake (whose songs are synonymous with autumnal Cambridge melancholia). Meg, meanwhile, flirts with a Proust specialist, then lets Nick know she's open to an affair. The climax is a dinner-table tour de force by Nick, who announces to everyone: “I am truly fucked.” As can only happen in such theatrical set-pieces, which magically transcend the embarrassments of reality, he achieves a true moment of desolate grandeur.

Nick and Meg are fucked indeed, as are we all sooner or later, but the wit and acuity of Le Week-End is that it enables us to acknowledge the fact through articulate, if somewhat self-deceiving, characters who express their dilemma with some style. Kureishi's craft lies in not making these characters too lovable, or even tolerable. In real life, they'd bore you rigid; on screen they become, in all their disgruntlement, quite mesmerizing.

Goldblum, meanwhile, plays everyone's idea of Jeff Goldblum, almost a Saturday Night Live impersonation of himself, with added Rive Gauche smugness. But we haven't seen him doing his routine with such zest for years, and his bizarre twitchy inflections pepper the film with a dash of arch cosmopolitan glamour. When the trio round things off with a finale of le Madison , it's a lovely curtain call—an imitation of an imitation, two Brits and an American impersonating three French actors doing a jukebox dance à l'américaine . It's a neat touch of the knowingness which the French call second degré : the film embraces its own artifice, even phoniness, in a sweet, light kiss-off to a scenario that, at heart, couldn't be bleaker or more bitterly real.

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Review: ‘Le Week-End’ offers an unremittingly bleak 48 hours in Paris

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“Le Week-End” is a sour and misanthropic film masquerading as an honest and sensitive romance. A painful and unremittingly bleak look at a difficult marriage, it wants us to sit through a range of domestic horrors without offering much of anything as a reward.

This is especially disheartening because on an abstract level the film’s participants on both sides of the camera are talented individuals with strong resumes.

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, who star as the unhappy couple, are two of Britain’s top actors. Director Roger Michell has both “Notting Hill” and the Jane Austen adaptation “Persuasion” to his credit, and his collaboration with “Week-End” writer Hanif Kureishi on “Venus,” starring Peter O’Toole, was excellent as well.

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But it’s hard to watch “Le Week-End” without feeling that in this instance, it’s all just a case of good money thrown after bad. Though what’s been attempted is defensible in theory, in practice, all the film manages to do is leave the worst possible taste in your mouth.

Broadbent and Duncan star as Nick and Meg Burroughs, a couple headed to Paris, where they honeymooned, to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary.

Celebrate, it soon becomes clear, is hardly the operative word here. Before they even get off the Eurostar, Nick and Meg needle each other like bickering was going out of style. He’s a whiner, she’s a bully, and the fact that they do not get along couldn’t be clearer.

On arrival in Paris, things get worse. Nick, who loves the familiar, has booked them into the same Montmartre hotel they honeymooned in, while Meg, ever the iconoclast, refuses to spend so much as a night in a room with beige walls. She storms out of the place and into a taxi, with Nick sniveling in the background, “Meg, no, please ... don’t do this.”

The Burroughses end up at a high-end hotel they can’t even begin to afford, in a suite Tony Blair once occupied, no less, leading to more Nick worrying that Paris is “a brilliantly designed machine for extracting all our money.” Meg, for her part, couldn’t care less.

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With all this as background, things get, if possible, worse for the happy couple when both partners decide Paris would be the perfect place to reveal things they’ve kept to themselves. Academic Nick is being forced into early retirement, while Meg is thinking of leaving her job and quite possibly the marriage itself. Not exactly a recipe for a memorable vacation.

Still, no film set in Paris is totally without its charms. Nick and Meg eat in some delicious-looking restaurants (I wish I’d written down the names), and it was nice to get a glimpse of old friends like the Tschann Libraire bookstore and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” which supplies a key film clip.

And, to be fair, “Le Week-End” does offer the occasional random good-humored remark shared by longtime partners, but these seem more like afterthoughts than anything else. Mostly, Nick and Meg flay the skin off each other, the deeper the cut the better.

Setting both their lives in perspective, and offering a truly feeble deus ex machina as the film struggles to escape from its own bile, is a chance encounter with guileless American academic Morgan (a game but miscast Jeff Goldblum), an old Cambridge chum of Nick’s who has achieved the kind of success that has eluded our hero.

Inevitably, however, “Le Week-End” attempts to find a ray of sunshine in this gloomy mess and comes off as contrived and completely unconvincing. Screenwriter Kureishi, the mastermind of this tour through hell, has thrown his heart so completely into the horror show aspects of his story that his belated attempts to change the tune are doomed to ignominious failure. And that’s putting it mildly.

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---------------------------------

‘Le Week-End’

No MPAA rating

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Playing: At Landmark, West Los Angeles

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LE WEEK-END

"a complicated marriage saved by enduring love".

What You Need To Know:

(Pa, Ro, B, C, LL, S, A, DD, MM) Mixed pagan worldview with some Romantic, moral, and Christian, redemptive elements about a marriage in trouble that’s eventually redeemed, mostly by enduring love, including a visit to a church; 20 obscenities, four profanities, and some other crude language; no violence; brief sexual innuendo; no nudity; alcohol use; smoking marijuana at one point; and, stealing and couple sneaks out on their restaurant bill.

More Detail:

LE WEEK-END is a comedy-drama about a middle-aged married couple trying to rekindle their relationship by going to Paris to relive their honeymoon. Despite some boring parts, it’s an insightful, entertaining movie with a nice ending, but there are some elements that require extreme caution.

Director Roger Michell’s (MORNING GLORY and HYDE PARK ON HUDSON) LE WEEK-END follows late middle-aged couple, Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg Burrows (Lindsay Duncan) as they set out to revisit the Paris of their honeymoon and hopefully revive their marriage. It’s their 30th wedding anniversary, the children are grown and gone. Aboard the Eurostar train to Paris, university professor Nick, forgetful, bumbling in tweed, irritates his wife by simply breathing. “I could lose you in a minute!” Meg announces passive-aggressively. Their relationship is teetering on the edge of collapse. Yet, mutually irritated though this couple may be, moments of deep mutual love punctuate their marriage. It’s complicated.

In Paris, Nick has booked them at the same hotel as their honeymoon. However, on arrival, what was perfect 30 years ago is now a model of mediocrity – a beige prison. Meg snaps, grabbing her luggage and leaving. She drags Nick to a fancy hotel they can’t really afford, announcing to the concierge, “Whatever it costs!”

Meg and Nick take in the City of Lights. Moments of further exasperation are interrupted by tender moments and moments of mutual laughter.

Nick takes a soda can top and offers it as a ring to Meg, proposing, “Try me again!” They kiss passionate just as an old friend, Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), bumps into them. Morgan, Nick’s former protégé, is an eccentric American, published and successful. He invites them to a party at his home to meet his new twenty-something wife. At the party, a secret about Nick’s job at a second-rate school for “idiots” comes to the fore, and Meg discovers how deeply Nick loves her. Will it be enough to give them a new start?

LE WEEK-END is a story of deep love and commitment, as well as a marriage in desperate need of healing and exorcising its past. A second honeymoon in Paris provides all the fodder for renewed romance while simultaneously releasing 30 years of pent-up frustration and unprocessed emotion. At times very raw, it’s a romantic story of a couple fighting to save a marriage. The ending seems to show that enduring love not only keeps a marriage going but also saves it from being destroyed.

LE WEEK-END is well directed and smartly written, though the unconventional story structure grows slow and a bit boring toward the end. However, the strong performances manage to keep things going and bring the movie to a satisfying conclusion. Extreme caution is advised for some foul language and a scene with marijuana.

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Le Week-End – review

It should in theory be possible to make a movie about a couple who make a sentimental journey to Paris to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary, only to discover over 48 unforgettable hours that they are entirely content with each other. That isn't what happens in Le Week-End, written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell. Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent play Meg and Nick, two married almost-retirees who, in the autumn of their lives, have decided to award themselves a Eurostar trip to the world's most romantic city. As the action continues, the audience is likely to have the same relationship with the film as the main characters have with each other: sometimes exasperated, sometimes bored, often affectionate. It's funny in a hangdog way: lugubrious and downbeat, prickly and bloody-minded, contrived in its crises, and demonstrating the kind of unsentimentality that is actually a bit sentimental. It all creates the kind of gentle melancholy comedy after which you leave the cinema not sure quite how depressed you are supposed to be feeling.

Le Week-End is about an interesting subject, a subject that is the elephant in the living room – or rather the elephant on the Saga holiday, the elephant on the grey-pound world cruise, the elephant thoughtfully sucking the Werther's Original – and that is the emotional and sexual lives of old or older people, who generally don't get to appear much on movies or television. Meg and Nick are finding that as they get older, mother nature has played a cruel trick on them. As well as the persistent twinges and pains and agonies of physical decay, they find that they are still poignantly interested in life, interested enough to yearn for more, and to be therefore intensely dissatisfied with themselves and with each other as time runs out, and to find they are still sufficiently compos mentis for this to be almost intolerably painful.

The Paris trip has thrown it all into stark relief. As they glance at each other in their unfamiliar hotel room, seeing each other as if for the first time, it is as if fate has fixed them up on a blind date, kept them blind for three decades and then finally whipped off the blindfold to let each see the grumpy, sagging oldster they're stuck with. At one stage, Meg is astonished at some misjudged suggestion of Nick's: "Don't you know me at all?"

This sudden disorientation or estrangement has a weirdly erotic side effect – which also has something to do with being in a sleek hotel room. Sex could well be on the agenda. And yet this subject, pleasurable though it is, raises the issue of Nick's toxic jealousy, itself a byproduct of his queasy self-doubt.

Meg teaches in a secondary school and Nick is a philosophy lecturer at a new university: his academic position, it turns out, is rather precarious, owing to a faculty row – and here Kureishi may be influenced by the fictions of JM Coetzee and Philip Roth, although the dispute is not dwelt upon. As for Meg, her position is different, but the same miasma of discontent is overhead. Over the years, Nick has managed to suppress his disappointment with life, but his underachievement can't be ignored when the couple run into Morgan, amiably played by Jeff Goldblum: a media-star academic who was Nick's university contemporary and who once looked up to him as the greater mind: a charismatic hipster who loved Godard.

Morgan roguishly flirts with Meg and invites the couple to the ritzy launch party for his latest shallow work of pop philosophy, an event that lights the blue touchpaper under the rocket of their marital despair. Could it be that what this weekend has revealed to the couple is how very much they basically dislike each other? And if that is the case, do they have the courage to act on this knowledge?

Part of the couple's agony is that they are empty-nesters. They did not fully realise that they may face a long future post-children and post-work: things which had for so long been their reason for living. It is Nick especially who is afraid of being alone, but at the same time afraid of being alone with his wife: the reason, perhaps, why he had allowed their deadbeat son to live with them in the family home for so long. This is a return to a favourite topic of Kureishi's – intimacy – and for me the movie is a distant reminder of his 2001 film Intimacy , directed by the late Patrice Chéreau.

But along with this fear is a kind of jittery, defiant freedom and fun, a feeling that going for broke is now a real lifestyle option, maybe the only option. Duncan and Broadbent give warm and intelligent performances. In their faces you can see the ghosts of the kids Meg and Nick once were: stroppy, horny and happy.

Le Week-End: first look review

Le Week-End: watch the trailer

Xan Brooks interviews Lindsay Duncan

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The Newest Movie Reviews to Get You Through This Stacked Weekend

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It’s now the end of what has been quite a long week and you know what that means: lots of new movies to watch. We’ve not only covered them all, but we’ve assembled our reviews of each for you to read. Whether you want to learn about the new big release in theaters starring Russell Crowe or dive into the new sci-fi movie starring Léa Seydoux on VOD, we’ve got you covered.

In Theaters

'fancy dance' (2024), directed by erica tremblay.

Kicking things off is Erica Tremblay ’s fantastic Fancy Dance , the latest film to star the great Lily Gladstone after she blew us all away with her incredible work in Killers of the Flower Moon from last year. Her latest is a modern classic in the making, seeing her play the hustler with a heart of gold Jax as she tries to find her missing sister and look after her young niece. In my rave review back from when it played at Sundance in 2023 , I called it “one of the best of the year” and that absolutely remains true for 2024. Specifically, it’s a film that deserves just as much attention as her past work as Gladstone again proves she is a performer like no other.

Fancy Dance

Fancy Dance boasts not only another magnificent performance from Lily Gladstone, but every other aspect of it becomes a beautiful work of art.

• The film takes a familiar story and makes it into something that is bursting with life.
• Gladstone is able to do more without saying much at all than most actors could with pages and pages of dialogue.
• The conclusion is shattering yet sublime, proving to be one of those moments that can linger forever in our memories.

READ OUR REVIEW

'Janet Planet' (2024)

Directed by: annie baker.

Keeping up with films that made a buzz in festivals though are now rolling out into theaters, the joyous Janet Planet is also finally able to be seen by the world. Starring Julianne Nicholson in one of her very best performances to date in a career never lacking for them, my review I wrote earlier this year called it “a film of small moments and how they can accumulate into something that feels like it may last a lifetime.” It will change you just as it does its characters.

Janet Planet (2024)

Janet Planet is spectacular feature debut from writer-director Annie Baker with great performances by Zoe Ziegler and Julianne Nicholson that's one of the best films of 2024 so far.

• The film finds an understated beauty in its small corner of the world, delicately exploring the relationship between a mother and daughter.
• Janet Planet explores life's most pressing questions about how we can become set down certain paths and whether we can find a way free of them.
• Julianne Nicholson inhabits this world so naturally, it feels like you're just peeking in on Janet's life.
• The film ends with a fitting coda, cementing it as an evocative and essential work.

'Kinds of Kindness' (2024)

Directed by: yorgos lanthimos.

Good news for fans of Yorgos Lanthimos as his new movie, Kinds of Kindness , is a return to him being his unrestrained weird self. Starring Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone as well as many others, it’s a film of three different yet interconnected stories where everyone is anything but kind. In my review from when it premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival , I said that it was a “return to form” for the director and “while he was far from dead like the corpses in this film, Kinds of Kindness feels like Lanthimos is himself coming back to life once more.”

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Kinds of Kindness is a return to form for Yorgos Lanthimos, bring his distinctly dark humor and boasting a standout performance by Jesse Plemons.

• After some more straightforward successes, Kinds of Kindness proves that Lanthimos still has plenty of weird films left in the tank.
• All of the cast get their moment to excel, but it's Jesse Plemons who proves to be the best of the bunch.
• With a strong opener and closer, Lanthimos again dissects our toxic relationships with plenty of flair to spare.
• The middle section is a little more confined and the overall film doesn't have the room to build tension like Lanthimos has in the past.

'Thelma' (2024)

Directed by: josh margolin.

Move over Tom Cruise , there is a new action star in town and her name is June Squibb . In writer-director Josh Margolin ’s Thelma , she’s on a mission to get her money back after it is stolen by some no-good scammers. In his review from back at this year’s Sundance , Senior Film Editor Ross Bonaime said that this is “the definition of a light comedy, but Squibb and Margolin’s handling of this pseudo-spy parody makes it a delight.”

Thelma (2024)

Thelma, from writer-director Josh Margolin, gives June Squibb her first lead role in an action-comedy that showcases her strengths.

• June Squibb is delightful as the title character, trying to get revenge on elderly scammers.
• Josh Margolin's script is a smart parody that never insults its older characters.
• The supporting cast never quite manages to feel as fleshed out as the characters played by Squibb and Richard Roundtree.

'The Exorcism' (2024)

Directed by: joshua john miller.

Continuing on we have Crowe taking on yet another movie of demons with The Exorcism , a movie about a movie where he plays a man tasked with playing a priest in a production where he begins to become actually possessed. Does this meta-horror take have the potential to be a new Scream ? Not according to our reviewer and Horror Editor Emma Kiely. She called the film “a dense, dark, and heavy horror drama” that starts out well enough to abandon “everything it's been setting up to give way to formulaic and stale scare sequences.”

The Exorcism (2024)

The Exorcism has an interesting idea at its core but ultimately falls victim to its self-seriousness and empty scares.

• The meta quality of its concept makes for some fun jabs at the horror genre.
• The Exorcism abandons all the interesting ideas it sets up in the first act to give way to drab scare sequences.
• Russell Crowe gives a much less enlightened performance than his last horror venture.

'The Bikeriders' (2024)

Directed by: jeff nichols.

Okay, so if the big theatrical horror release of the week left us cold, maybe the historical biker drama The Bikeriders will get our motor running? Unfortunately, while this film has a stacked cast in Jodie Comer , Austin Butler , Mike Faist , Tom Hardy , and more, this again left our Kiely less than compelled . In her review from back at the London Film Festival, she wrote that the film “seems shiny on the surface” though doesn’t deliver on any of its promising elements, falling flat “in its excessive filler, undeveloped characters, and symphony of bonkers accents.”

The Bikeriders

The Bikeriders leans too heavily on its talented ensemble and asks its audience to invest in a half-baked story.

• Jodie Comer gives a committed and passionate performance, making her a stand-out in the cast.
• The marriage between Kathy and Benny is at the center of the story but their relationship isn't developed enough to feel authentic.
• The main characters of The Bikeriders aren't fully formed, making it hard to connect to them.

'Animalia' (2024)

Directed by: sofia alaoui.

If you consider yourself a fan of recent sci-fi series like Constellation and Invasion or just an appreciator of well-told stories in the genre writ large, you’re going to want to see Animalia . A film that takes a unique take on what seems to be a visit by some forces that are not of this Earth, it centers on a woman who has been disconnected from her family and must make her way back to them as the world is coming apart. In my review from back at Sundance , I praised the film’s “willingness to peer directly through the looking glass that most other science fiction works would blink in the face” as this is where it “taps into something that remains as spectacular as it is elusive."

Animalia is a surreal, striking sci-fi vision that proves writer-director Sofia Alaoui is one to watch.

• Oumaïma Barid gives a dynamic performance, grounding the sweeping sci-fi story in the personal.
• There are plenty of standout visual sequences that grab hold of you even as they offer no explicit explanation.
• As the film peers through the looking glass, it taps into something that remains as spectacular as it is elusive.

'I Saw the TV Glow' (2024)

Directed by: jane schoenbrun.

Trust us when we say that I Saw the TV Glow is an A24 horror film that you’ll be talking about all year. The second feature from director Jane Schoenbrun , it’s about a television show called The Pink Opaque that soon becomes a subject of obsession for two young teens. When it’s canceled, they’ll have to figure out what to do with their lives and who each of them are. In his review from Sundance , Bonaime said that it is “a daring step forward for Schoenbrun as a filmmaker and a film that will certainly divide audiences not sure what the hell to make of it.”

I Saw the TV Glow

I Saw the TV Glow is a fascinating sophomore feature by Jane Schoenbrun. It's a weird and beautiful experience that has to be seen to be believed.

• Jane Schoenbrun tells an effective story that blends horror, nostalgia, and larger themes of transition.
• I Saw the TV Glow has a truly strange cast that somehow works well when put together.
• Schoenbrun creates a film that deserves discussion, as it will certainly mean something different to everyone who sees it.

'The Beast' (2024)

Directed by: bertrand bonello.

Last but definitely not least is The Beast , a film whose title could not be more fitting. A monumental and menacing work of sci-fi, it follows two lovers whose lives are connected across multiple timelines that are all seem to be coming apart before them. In my review from back at the Toronto International Film Festival , I called it one of “the most formidable films you'll be lucky enough to see in a lifetime” whose “final echoes you hear may just continue to ring out.”

The Beast (2024)

The Beast is a monumental and menacing sci-fi film with an astounding performance by Léa Seydoux that you won't soon forget.

• Writer-director Bertrand Bonello has made what is his best film yet, making everything come viscerally alive.
• Léa Seydoux is brilliant once more, ensuring we feel every moment even as the film itself is quite unwieldy.
• The ending providing a spectacular and striking conclusion that is certain to be among the most formidable you see for some time.
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Kinds of Kindness

A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife's demeanor after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman searches for an extraordinary individual pro... Read all A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife's demeanor after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman searches for an extraordinary individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide. A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife's demeanor after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman searches for an extraordinary individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide.

• Yorgos Lanthimos
• Efthimis Filippou
• Jesse Plemons
• Willem Dafoe
• 16 User reviews
• 88 Critic reviews
• 71 Metascore
• 1 win & 3 nominations

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• Trivia The film tells three separate stories with the cast playing different characters in each. But in an interview with We Need to Talk About Oscar, the editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis said, there's one actor plays the same character in all three stories who connects them in a strange way.

User reviews 16

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• May 31, 2024

The 2024 Festival Films You Need to Know

• When was Kinds of Kindness released? Powered by Alexa
• June 28, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Merhamet Hikayeleri
• New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Element Pictures
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• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Jun 23, 2024

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• Runtime 2 hours 44 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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Movies | ‘horizon: chapter 1’ review: saddle up for a long, loping ride.

Things could perk up and get rolling come August, when Chapter 2 of this reverently labeled “American Saga” continues in theaters, to be followed by Chapter 3 (currently filming) and then, finances and distribution/streaming arrangements with Warner Bros. and Max willing, the big finale. But Chapter 1 feels like throat-clearing — a serviceable horse opera overture to a curiously dispassionate passion project.

“Horizon” dates back to the 1980s, when Costner’s career was launched by “Silverado” (1985), in which he was the liveliest element by far, playing the giddy, loose-cannon brother of Scott Glenn. Rewatching “Silverado” today, in the wake of Costner’s familiar, surly, “Yellowstone” grimacing, it’s astonishing how little remains of that earlier performer, and it’s not just the age difference. Now 69, Costner has settled in a narrow, slot-canyon sort of macho archetype, which has worked well for him, depending on the scripts. Here and there in “Horizon” it works, too, when the calculation falls away and a stray moment of hidden feeling surfaces, quietly.

But actors are at the mercy of their material. Chapter 1 of “Horizon” is wide but shallow, and wanly dramatized in between the passages of violence, some well-staged and effective, others more generically brutal. The movie surely wins the Loudest Splurch sound design award; when an Apache arrow hits a human target, it’s as if the arrows were literally wired for sound.

The first “Horizon” film divides itself into what feels like three one-hour TV episodes. Cowriters Jon Baird and Costner lay many miles of narrative track designed to transport several groups of characters in different parts of the West to the same destination, a tiny riverbank town in the making called Horizon in the San Pedro Valley, aka John Ford country. This is where the film starts, in 1859.

It’s Apache land, and the white colonizers (fine, “settlers”) have put literal stakes in it to claim it for themselves. This leads quickly to a retaliatory Apache massacre, contextualized a bit by a handful of scenes in Chapter 1 devoted to, or at least concerned with, Apache warrior brothers Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) and Taklishim (Tatanka Means) and their tribal factions. Two survivors of the massacre, brutally widowed Frances (Sienna Miller) and her daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail), are taken in by the kindly Union Army officer played by Sam Worthington at a nearby fort. Love is in the air, but demurely.

Costner directed “Horizon” in addition to co-writing, producing and partially financing the project; he has acknowledged planning to spend $100 million or more of his own money to conjure all four chunks of the saga into existence. As an actor, he rides into Chapter 1 at the one-hour point, as tight-lipped Hayes Ellison, horse trader and former gunslinger. He’s in pre-statehood Montana territory for reasons to be named later, and he’s soon tangling with a random scumbag from a mean, bloodthirsty local clan. Haphazardly, Costner’s character ends up heading out on the trail with wily sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee) who’s taking care of a baby, while bad men pursue them and Costner’s faraway wife remains, for now, unseen and far away.

Meanwhile, along the Santa Fe Trail, Luke Wilson plays a wagon train leader trying to keep his Horizon-bound settlers alive in the hot Kansas territory, with little water, plenty of crises and, at one point, a couple of pervy Peeping Toms spying on the best-looking female while she sneaks a starlit shower for herself. Wilson’s character, the voice of reason, basically shames the woman for hogging the water and catching the menfolk’s eye. You can see what Costner and Baird are attempting here, adding this tidbit about the scarcity of the water supply. But dialogue like this, and too much of “Horizon,” is just plain flat. I don’t think Costner’s his own best colleague here, either as writer or director. He and his cinematographer J. Michael Muro have an eye for topography, and  backdrops, but “Horizon” needs more than horizons.

So you take what you can get. I got some honest satisfaction from Miller’s valiant attempt to make her saintly cliché human, and from the ease and laconic command Michael Rooker (as a Union Army officer and sounding board for Danny Huston’s fort commander) brings to the material. Chapter 1 ends with a sizzle reel of Chapter 2 highlights, giving audiences a sense of where all the characters are headed, and introducing new, big-city ones. The only thing missing is a voiceover: “Next time on ‘Horizon’ …”

I can’t help but wonder if Costner didn’t take his cues from the wrong kind of Westerns. Watch Anthony Mann’s “The Naked Spur” (1953) sometime, which gave James Stewart one of his most bracing challenges; the movie’s scenic but purposeful, lean, compact, character-driven, full of shifting allegiances and centered, however uneasily, by a fascinatingly self-doubting protagonist. Costner has it in him to work that same territory. “Horizon,” so far, anyway, is more about a certain set of movie memories than a movie of its own.

“Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1” — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for violence, some nudity and sexuality)

Running time: 3:01

How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 27

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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Movies in Theaters (2024)

Inside Out 2 Surpasses Dune: Part 2 as Highest-Grossing Movie of 2024 So Far

Nothing but joy for the pixar sequel..

Inside Out 2 has surpassed Dune: Part 2 to become the highest-grossing movie of 2024, and it only took eight days to secure that title at the U.S. box office.

As reported by Variety , the animated tentpole from Disney and Pixar has so far earned $724 million at the worldwide box office, including $355 million in the U.S. and Canada, overtaking Dune: Part 2's $711 million global haul (with $282 million from the U.S. and Canada) to become the most successful movie of the year.

Inside Out 2

Inside Out 2 followed its massive opening weekend with more staggering ticket sales in its sophomore outing, raking in $100 million in the U.S. and Canada and $164 million from other territories in its second weekend at theaters. These takings put it on track to become the first movie of 2024 to join the $1 billion box office club .

Last weekend, Inside Out 2 scored the second-biggest opening of all time for an animated film behind the $182 million Incredibles 2 brought in back in 2018. Pixar's latest also secured the biggest U.S. opening of 2024 and became the first film to cross $100 million in its first few days (since Barbie's achievement last summer).

Inside Out 2 takes audiences further inside the mind of Riley, now a teenager conjuring an entirely new range of emotions . IGN recently toured the Pixar Animation Studios campus in California and caught up with director Kelsey Mann to take a closer look at the new characters, plus the designs that didn't make the final cut.

Audiences have hardly been able to contain their emotions over Inside Out 2. The movie is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes , with critics praising its visuals, cast, and clever storytelling. IGN's review of Inside Out 2 called it "a smart but emotionally stunted sequel" with "a few inventive ideas that make for hearty amusement."

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X/Twitter here .

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