Popular reviews

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  Review by Sophy ★★★★ 2

  This woman knows how to direct god damn curtains.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 1

  The ephemera of the everyday is all that is necessary for spectacle itself, and through that understanding we travel through the trajectory of the film itself, which heaps can be written on. A masterpiece, maybe the only one of 2017 - pure cinema to the point where I wanted to scream. A cultural embarrassment that it wasn't programmed in New York or Toronto, one which only demonstrates the increasing irrelevance such failing North American institutions have within the context of world cinema. Are such institutions necessary these days? No, but it's just as depressing that this film asks to be seen on a theatre screen - Massadian is a director who understands scale and perspective - and its just remarkable…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½ 2

  We live in an era of bold, largely unexplored new possibilities in technology and perspective in filmmaking that should make this a critical age of cinema, yet so often it seems that even the best films from a given year only prod at long-entrenched boundaries. Milla is one of those movies that feels thrillingly new, something that defies usual critical structures of referential allusion by existing well outside potential peers. It first two shots, the first of a gossamer-silky tableau of two young lovers entwined against some woods, a vividly Romantic sketch then immediately grounded by a follow-up shot of the same action that reveals its hazy filter to have been a car’s fogged rear window, and the painterly is…

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  Review by shookone ★

  it needs a baby boy and a feisty cat in the final third of the installment to juxtapose the intrusion of actual realism to the bloodless, stale and simply pretentious performance piece, outlining the heavy wish for significancy in the realms of social cinema. a debunking exposure.

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  Review by Sean Baker 1

  Watched a Vimeo link of this 2017 festival darling. Winner of the Special Jury Prize - Filmmakers of the Present.

  Appreciated the slow pace and mediative style. Don't love the untreated digital aesthetic.

  Grasshopper Films released in US.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  Life, with the 'boring' moments left in, and conventional phenomena removed, so we see the phenomena of the 'minor' itself. Never events, but all the tender moments between them, where all we consist of is vulnerability. Although there is a single trajectory here, it is separated into two halves: as the film is titled "Milla," it's not too difficult to figure out who this singular trajectory refers to. But these two halves have a distinct separation - life with and without the 'other.' But these two halves become necessary to depict a trajectory from immaturity to complete self-sufficiency.

  Frankly, I think this is one of the most beautiful films ever made. All throughout the work there is a recurring motif…

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  Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★★

  [8]

  Valérie Massadian's Milla is a film that seamlessly melds the ordinary with the otherworldly, and does so largely by asking us to focus on the small, fleeting moments of transcendence that dapple the quotidian and its material struggles. There, above the bed where two young lovers are spending a lazy morning, light peaks through the trees and penetrates the blinds, resulting in a quivering dance of sun sparkles. The afternoon sun, meanwhile, comes through the glass doors, hung with ruby red curtains, saturating the child's playroom with a deep burgundy glow. Even in the very first shot, we see the couple asleep amidst the trees, hazy and distorted, in a kind of diagonal piéta that recalls the films of…

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  Review by reibureibu 1

  A complete story told entirely through lapses, moments between moments when there is nothing left to say because we've already said our share. So what's left then, besides the mundane and everyday? Perhaps those are the most important parts, the inactive stretches that tell us more about ourselves than any active fragment can; when we are at our most inert, our most detached, do we not put up any masks. And so a story told in just those moments would pierce straight through to the utmost soul.

  "'I ride on storms, and I'll drown with no one to save me.' No Milla, you won't drown, you float. Forget these men walking with kilos in their feet."

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  Review by Jon M.

  Dear Cinema, do you think people know? Do you think they know you’re theirs and you need them? Do you think they know how much you need their thoughts, their questions, their presence, their emotions. Do you think they remember that some films are not entertainment but letters to them. Letters that say: I care, I love you, I’m angry, I’m lost, I’m strong, I’m weak, I’m you, I’m not you but I want to know you, I’m trying to understand, will you try with me too, I can cope with the unfairness, I’m scared of us, I hope, I don’t believe but I have faith, I’m the world with all its awkwardness, I try, we try, damn we try… can we try together. Will you come? Wherever we screen, or will you stay home alone? - Valérie Massadian, Senses of Cinema n. 98 (2021)

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★

  One of the least condescending films on poverty, so much so that it took me 4 viewings to realize it.

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  Review by Arta ★★★½

  "To me, it’s all in this word 'observational.' I’m not observing, because that’s a position. The only judgment I will have on a film is political: the position of the person filming. What is your position?"
  Valérie Massadian

  A film of incredible beauty and tenderness which treats its subjects with a degree of respect that's increasingly hard to find (and achieve) in movies.

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  Review by calamityhey ★★★★½ 2

  A movie that really actually hangs around and feels good to think about. Massadian never makes her characters justify or provide evidence for their motivations and emotions, we must accept their lives for what they are. We aren't afforded miserablism or tragedy either, nor moments of joy that are codified as traditionally cinematic. Poignancy found in mundanity as well as the act of living itself. Massadian locates a grandness in what could be ignorantly described as a "small life" - what act is bigger and more defiant than living for another? The universe that Severine Jonckeere and Luc Chessel (and eventually, their infant son) build together is surely insular - they'll never impact the larger world, they may never even…