Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

treywillwest This film, a swan song in the most tragic and literal of senses, encapsulates much of what had characterized Chantal Akerman's career as a filmmaker. It's one of her most personal and least compromising films (and that's saying something!). In fact, it's so personal and uncompromising that if one watches it independently of the rest of her oeuvre it might seem a meaningless, tedious experience. For the established Akerman aficionado, however, it can be a powerful, if terribly sad, work of art. Akerman might be said to belong to a tradition of super-self-reflexive Jewish artists such as Philip Roth, Woody Allen, and Clarice Lispector. Her protagonists are often vaguely disguised versions of herself. For her first feature she herself played the protagonist, a detached, sexually adventurous young woman. As with the works of the afore- mentioned artists, some will find many of her films too personal, as if they are only relevant to Akerman's own personal history and state of mind. For this reason, Jeanne Diehlmann, which clearly offers a more universal vision, or at least one pertinent to women in western society, is Akerman's most significant work. Akerman's relationship with her Holocaust surviving mother has been an ongoing concern in her films, from Letters From Home through The Rendezvous of Anna and, in a less direct way, in Jeanne Diehlmann. This final film, completed shortly before Akerman's suicide, is the summation of that theme. Here we see Akerman's actual mother for the first time, having previously only been read her letters in Letters From Home some forty plus years earlier. We also see glimpses of Akerman herself in her sixties, unrecognizable from the ingenue she embodied in that first feature. As the mother, at first a vivacious old woman, fades into poor health, the film becomes somewhat like a documentary version of Haneke's Amour, minus the degree of sadism always present in Haneke's work. The guiding emotion of these last scenes is a pain and loneliness that cannot express itself. I usually don't like it when people describe works of art as disguised suicide notes by their artists, but it seems unavoidable here. The film is tender and hopeless.

pegasus3 An insufferably boring film consisting of meaningless imagery, and mundane conversations, all of which, I suppose, Ms. Akerman construed as some kind of artful exposition of her relationship with her mother. While Ms. Akerman may title the film "No Home Movie" it nevertheless comes across as a most pretentious "Art House Home Movie" and could well qualify as some sort of archetypal example of Cinema of The Absurd. You may love it if you are fascinated with five minutes of a tree blowing in the wind, a shirtless obese man sitting in a park, a broken down lawn chair in a garden, long stretches of desert scenery jaggedly photographed from a moving car, or ridiculously superficial conversations of no concern to the viewer filmed through a doorway or in the dark.

dewer-2 Sorry. I have to disagree with other reviewers. This was possibly the most boring movie ever made. I know it was the worst I've ever watched. Long, long sequences of nothing--wind blowing, empty rooms, silence--need I go on? OK--even when there was dialog, much of it is mumbled. The film maker was apparently attempting an homage to her mother, but ended up with two hours of sheer boredom.I have lived in France, frequently visited Belgium, and love my own mother. It was unfortunate that that this mother was captured so starkly and unsympathetically.The title is "No Home Movie" but it would more appropriately have been named "Unedited Home Movie". I suggest you watch paint dry rather than this misfire.

runamokprods Leave it to Chantal Akerman to close her career – and then her life – with a film that is by turns boring, heartrending, funny, confounding, symbolic, literal, dreamlike, experimental and concrete.Akerman's mother Natalie mother was often her muse, either literally, as in the documentary "Letters From Home, where a visual portrait of New York City is given context by the voice- over reading of letters from her mother, or more symbolically as in her 1974 masterpiece "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" – a terribly haunting but difficult 3 hour film about a single mother whose horribly boring on screen life - presented in glacial long shots of activities like cooking potatoes - covers up remarkable and deep secrets and emotions within. And here, right near the start of the film we see Akerman with her mother in a kitchen that is eerily identical to the one in "Jeanne Dielman" sitting and eating potatoes (and discussing their cooking) in the same kind of lengthy, static boring/fascinating shot. It's clear Akerman intends us to make the connection - that kind of mysterious playfulness is also often deep at the heart of her work.For a film that on some levels is a pretty straightforward and melancholy portrait of her loving, complex relationship with her mother, this is very much a challenging 'art film' on others. Shot over an indeterminate period of time, we see Natalie slowly deteriorating, death drawing ever nearer, but that is not only never discussed, but almost studiously ignored by the film-making. It's a film about death and loss where those subjects are rarely touched on, and where the whole thing starts with a 4 minute shot of a old tree in an unnamed desert being mercilessly blown by a howling wind.The location of that tree is never revealed, and it's connection to the larger story is left for the viewer to fill in. To me it represented her mother's resilience in a life where she faced much – including the Nazis, but also the kind of tough individualism that marked the lives of both mother and daughter. It also evoked Israel and seemed an ironic counterpoint to her mother's current housebound life. And last, it seemed to be issuing a challenge to watch closely, to not turn off our brains in boredom, but to transcend frustration to notice the kind of details that only come though actively looking over time, as opposed to passively watching (that challenge is another hallmark of many of Akerman's films).The film also has a deeply tragic meta aspect, We know that Natalie died during the finishing of the film and that Chantal took her life not long after. That knowledge suffuses even the most mundane moments with emotion and fascination. And as much as the film refers Akerman's earlier work in style and feel, there is also much that's new. In her earlier experiments in portraiture – whether of people or places – the lack of 'event' was always offset with the brilliant formal framing of the images. Here the camera placement feels - not saying is - totally random, often cutting off people's heads, or partially blocking the focus of the scene, as if Akerman has let go of trying to comment on life with the image, and is looking instead to capture a sense of being there in the more random way we see things in life. At times it can make the film itself feel annoyingly unfocused. But at others it brings a fresh variation to the very concept of cinema verite.This is not a film for everyone. Familiarity with, and admiration for Akerman's work certainly helps. But no question it is experimental, slow and sometimes just plain dull. On the other hand, it also touches things about the end of life – one's parent's and one's own – that are startling and sad, and couldn't be gotten to with a more familiar, comfortable and easy to digest approach.Akerman burst onto the scene as a challenging provocateur. With this film, she leaves the same way.