In French … 141 minute running time so WAY WAY too long and I struggled to make it even one hour in then wisely abandoned this just as it started the interminable and boring courtroom scenes … this was a terrible French movie … who cares about the story! This was a Letterbox top 10 movie; they did me dirty by recommending this and I paid $6! to stream it, giving me no good way to fast forward. This won the Palme d’Or?!? Awful.

God bless Dick Brody for being the only critic brave enough to pan it : “the cinematic equivalent of an airport read … Triet displays no sense of time, no sense of development, no sense of context, no sense of detail.”

I imagine the rising teen-age cinephile, just beginning to take an interest in world cinema and confidently seeking out such a film, bearing as it does the imprimatur of the art-house cinema’s high and venerable authorities as well as wide critical acclaim. I imagine the bewilderment that would follow the viewing—imagine it developing into a skepticism, or even wrath, that would risk engulfing far better films, ones also endorsed at the same festivals and hailed by the same notables. If this is the art of the movies, I imagine hearing, then movie art is bullshit. In the art-house consensus, the danger facing contemporary cinema is its artistic diminution brought about by the market dominance of commercially ravenous franchise films. The showcasing and enshrining of mediocre movies as masterworks poses as great a danger.

Amen!