ThiefHott Too much of everything

Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

SnoopyStyle Hélène is the matriarch of an extended scattered family. She lives in the country outside of Paris where she has kept valuable art from a famous artist uncle. She has two sons and a daughter. The family gathers for her 75th birthday but at the end of the day, everybody leaves. The family has worked to keep the artist's legacy including a new art book and a world tour where Hélène does talks. Later, she passes and the family has to deal with the inheritance. The eldest Frédéric Marly wants to preserve the home. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is a famous designer in NYC. Jérémie is in China as a supervisor in a shoe company. They have to come to terms with the lost of their treasured memories.It's French. It's talky. It's sincerely adult. It's family. When the siblings are all in one place, there is a feeling of a real family talking in a real way. The movie can drift from scene to scene. There is one standout among the third generation. She closes the movie in a profound scene. It's a family film in the truest sense.

Mike B This film has some things going for. The "summer home" which is the centrepiece of this film is lovely indeed. The story surrounds three siblings whose mother dies and they must deal with both the "summer home" and its contents. It's all done very humanly and without the buffoonery found in most "Hollywood films". The pace is slow and no big secrets are revealed. I got the feeling that if you haven't gone through the process of a parent dying and selling off the ancestral home this film would be far less appealing. I've gone through this whole ordeal and felt the film did capture the essence of it. But at times it was kind of like an "Antique Road Show" and my attention was starting to wander. Also the ending was somewhat trivial.

runamokprods Interesting, gentle sad (but not depressing) story of the inevitability of loss and chance.Three siblings decide whether to keep or sell their mother's country home and art collection after her death, exploring how we give 'things' meaning, and how that meaning changes due to context, generation, and what we need from them. But while the ideas are intriguing, and the acting good it never quite reached the deepest level of feeling or thoughtfulness for me. Called a masterpiece by a number of critics, and something close by others, I cant quite go there, but it is an intelligent, quietly moving experience, that I'll probably revisit yet again, since it grew on me on a second viewing.

evanston_dad Three adult siblings must decide what to do with their mother's house and collection of valuable art after her death in this melancholy but quite lovely film from Olivier Assayas."Summer Hours" really struck a chord with me, because I've just recently begun to see the results of aging in my own parents and am beginning in a real rather than abstract way to prepare myself for a time when I will not have them in my life. The film does wonders at conveying this particular family dynamic with very few moments of outright exposition; the first scene especially, a family gathering while the mother is still alive and wants to inform her children about what to do with her things when she passes, is a marvel of subtle nuances in both the writing and acting that clearly communicates the differences in the relationships between the mother and her three children. The oldest brother doesn't want to think about his mother's death in advance and wants to hold on to things after she's gone; the two younger children, living in different parts of the world, want to be rid of things as quickly and cleanly as possible. Yet the movie doesn't pass judgement on any of them, doesn't treat the oldest brother as a sentimental fool, nor the younger siblings as callously indifferent. It simply acknowledges the complexity of emotions involved in dealing with inanimate objects that represent years of a flesh-and-blood relationship.Grade: A