Café de Flore Reviews

Jean-Marc Vallée deploys a pretty sweeping arsenal of clichés in shoving his camera through the characters' streams of consciousness.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4

The double-barrelled plot demonstrates great imagination. It's a shame that it amounts to so little.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

The film's delicately curated textures are flushed down the toilet of narrative contrivance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Vallée appears content to put his audience through the emotional wringer for no discernible purpose, and the result is a film that is objectionable and ultimately pointless.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

An intriguingly unconventional drama that revels in dreamy interludes, stream-of-consciousness montages and weighty drama - but that never lives up to its stylistic promise.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

An overlong film that half works.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Goes from intriguing to irritating.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

Feels less like a movie than like a cinematic jigsaw puzzle whose agitation undermines the very continuity it wants to portray.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

This mushy, mystical French-Canadian melodrama tries to make parallel a pair of love stories: one between preteens with Down syndrome in 1969 Paris, and the second between a Quebecois DJ and his new amour some 40 years later.

Full Review

Remove the subtitles, and it's one of Cameron Crowe's head-in-the-clouds dramas, as scripted by M Night Shyamalan...

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

It's terribly long and repetitive for so delicately dreamy a diptych, and at times the modern-day story feels like little more than a drawn-out apologia for the wandering male gaze.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Disappointing, frustrating nonsense.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

Acting and soundtrack are spot-on but the frequent jump-cuts and lack of a compelling comparison between families work against the film's success.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

The cumulative effect is more tedious than profound.

Full Review

The French story is fascinating and beautifully acted, the French-Canadian one is romantic daytime TV drivel, and the links between them - mystic, metaphysical, musical - do not lead towards resonance or enlightenment.

Full Review

An overlong, emotionally shallow study of so-called 'twin flames', possible reincarnation and learning to let go of love.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Decade-hopping metaphysical romance descends into overwrought histrionics.

Full Review

A forgettable film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

After an exasperatingly lengthy build-up, the secret link between the two stories turns out to be utterly ridiculous, leaving a bad taste at the close.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

As abstract as the film is in theory, it is brought together with the conclusiveness of finishing a puzzle with no missing pieces.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.8/10