It's Only the End of the World

3.67
    It's Only the End of the World
    2016

    Synopsis

    Louis, a terminally ill writer, returns home after a long absence to tell his family that he is dying.

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    Cast

    • Gaspard UllielLouis-Jean Knipper
    • Nathalie BayeMartine
    • Vincent CasselAntoine Knipper
    • Marion CotillardCatherine
    • Léa SeydouxSuzanne Knipper
    • Antoine DesrochersPierre Jolicoeur
    • William Boyce BlanchetteYoung Louis
    • Sasha SamarTaxi Driver
    • Arthur CouillardLittle Boy on the Airplane
    • Patricia TulasneAir Hostess

    Recommendations

    • 80

      The Guardian

      Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.
    • 60

      The Telegraph

      The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.
    • 60

      Screen Daily

      The film’s dialogue has ample tang of real family discourse, but it often fails to rivet.
    • 58

      The Film Stage

      While he does, to an extent, stifle some of his more adolescent instincts in comparison to earlier films (e.g. Laurence Anyways and Mommy), Dolan generally appears to have mistaken maturity for joylessness.
    • 50

      IndieWire

      [Dolan's] crafted the semblance of a substantial movie that never quite gets where it was supposed to go.
    • 50

      TheWrap

      Dolan shoots in tightly held close-ups, forgoing spatial staging for the immediate pleasures of fabric and light. Whereas similar imagery filled his previous films with energy and life, here it just makes the somber piece feel more claustrophobic and inert.
    • 42

      The Playlist

      Having recruited as fine a cast of French-speaking thesps as has ever been assembled, and marshalled a strong behind-the-camera team, Dolan’s usually exuberant egotism is here taken so seriously that what we’re left with is a shrieking bore, without a single character worth rooting for, least of all the puddle of maudlin self-pity at its center.
    • 40

      CineVue

      The material is weak, overly familiar and cliché-ridden. Dolan throws the cinematic sink at it but his latest feels like a shorter, not particularly watchable sequel to August, Osage County.

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