Alicia I love this movie so much

Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

adrian-43767 Godard may have been one of the French New Wave's main stars but, as a person, he could be repulsive without trying. Not that the film portrays him as overly selfish or self-centered, but he seems to live in his own mind, and have standards that he switches at his own convenience. As the film opens, he is 37 and he has just started a romantic involvement with 19 year old exquisitely beautiful wife to be Anne (solidly played by Stacy Martin, who looks very much like Catherine Deneuve at the height of her splendor, only better) . Given that the film is mostly told from Anne's point of view, we get to see Godard's steady mental disintegration and growing loss of touch with reality, as told from her standpoint, while all along she keeps retiring into an observer's position. In light of the fact that the film is based on Anne Wiazemsky's autobiographical account of her relationship with Godard, she emerges from this film with her image apparently far more intact - but also as a bit of a tell-tale who thinks nothing of reducing her former husband's reputation to the lowest possible level.Physically, Louis Garrel looks like Godard, imitates his famous lisp very well, and his performance is superb, even if the character does nothing to encourage anyone's sympathy, let alone liking. The way he joins the student demonstrations of May 1968, but flees police as soon as he feels that he is in danger; and the way he bends Maoist doctrine to his own take on life, says much about the pitfalls of this once and briefly great director.Michel Hazanavicius' direction is first class, his screenplay not really. The submarine, Le Redoutable, and the repeatedly broken spectacles are jokes that have worn rather thin by film's end.Soundtrack is generally vivid and brings back the day, including some lovely music, but there is also some jarring noise, typical of what made Godard so unique in films like MASCULINE FEMININE, A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, LE MÉPRIS.Ultimately, it is a movie for lovers of the French cinema. I am one, and I am grateful for what I learned from it. That said, LE REDOUTABLE/GODARD MON AMOUR makes for some rather uncomfortable viewing because of Godard's disintegration. On the other hand, thank God Stacy Martin is so beautiful, with her around I can forgive any flaws in the movie.

Richard Chatten Non-admirers of Jean-Luc Godard probably won't be bothering to watch this film in the first place, but I'm sure they'd be reasonably satisfied with the hatchet job that author Anne Wiazemsky and director Michel Hazanavicius have done on Godard, since even most of his admirers as a filmmaker and political guru probably already had a pretty bleak estimation of him as a human being.Being based on a 2015 memoir by Godard's long estranged ex-wife, the late Anne Wiazemsky (1947-2017), the film is inevitably going to be as much about her as him, and its depiction of him even more inevitably from her jaundiced viewpoint. This also unfortunately means that the film concentrates on their time together between their marriage in 1967 and their separation in 1970, when both his gifts as a filmmaker and passion for cinema had recently curdled; although there was still enough of the film nerd in him to claim with a straight face (in probably the film's best scene) the legacy of Jerry Lewis more worthwhile than that of Jean Renoir. (I wonder how Godard took the news - if it ever reached him - of Lewis's later enthusiasm for Reagan and Trump.)During his previous marriage to Anna Karina he was probably just as difficult a husband but hadn't become the politically doctrinaire bore and boor that Wiazemsky had to deal with (she portrays him as self-centred and neglectful rather than abusive). Godard's admirers at the time and since have tended to excuse the calamitous decline in the quality of his films after 1965 as politically justified, since they saw the unwatchable screeds he was now churning out as the legitimate expression of his commitment to "make films politically" by no longer making them entertaining rather than because he'd simply lost it. Louis Garrel gives an energetic performance in the lead, but is too tall and good looking (he actually looks more like Jean-Pierre Léaud), fails to capture the nasal voice familiar from Godard's own films, his perennial 5 o'clock shadow has become designer stubble and then a full beard by the time the film ends; and he just isn't as weird and inscrutable as the man himself remains to this day. Hazanavicius throughout lovingly recreates the look of Godard's early 60's films when he was in his prime, but treats him more as a comical figure like Woody Allen, complete with the running joke lifted from 'Take the Money and Run' in which his glasses keep getting broken and the admirer who like those in 'Stardust Memories' wishes he'd make another "funny film". (Not that Godard's pre-1968 films were all light-hearted bon-bons by any stretch of the imagination. 'Le Petit Soldat' and 'Les Carabiniers', anyone?)

pedrokolari The movie covers a period in Jean Luc Godard's life, the one he spent with his second wife, the late Anne Wiazemsky. Nobody who is at all interested in cinema should miss it. It feels and sounds quite authentic. However, based as it appears to be on Ms. Wiazemsky's memoirs (they had not spoken to each other for over 40 years), not unsurprisingly it paints JLG in a less than flattering shade. Given that the famous director is the leit motif of the film to begin with, that may give you a funny feeling. It certainly gave JLG that kind of feeling since he called the film "stupid". It isn't: gives lots of insights into the period, the Paris May movement, the film industry at the time, as well as the relationship itself, whichever side you would be inclined to take. It's a good movie.

spinuadrian Don't watch when you don't want to waste your time.