Summer Hours in the UK.

Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours "is a quiet and lyrical movie that poses a pertinent question in a time where philanthropists like Eli Broad are wresting power from museums: if you are fortunate enough to inherit art, what should you do with it?" Laura Allsop, writing in Art Review, finds the film instructive.

The Guardian's Xan Brooks finds Summer Hours to be "an airy Chekhovian miniature in which Charles Berling and Juliette Binoche play bourgeois siblings parcelling up the estate of their dead mother and the great artist she shacked up with. In his unobtrusive fashion, Assayas poses telling questions about the ways we lay our past to rest."

"With a seemingly loose but meticulously assembled narrative in the style of his earlier ensemble piece Late August, Early September, it chronicles the interactions between the various characters with psychological subtlety and precision, even as it explores the changing roles played by art, property, work and blood-ties in an increasingly globalised world," writes Geoff Andrew in Time Out. "Perhaps the characters are finally a little too uniformly decent, but it would be churlish to bemoan the generosity of spirit in a film so beautifully performed, intelligently written and fluently directed."

"Assayas seems to flip-flop between jagged postmodernism and stately neo-classicism, and it makes him one of the most restless talents in current cinema," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "Summer Hours fits comfortably into the second bracket... It has Assayas's favourite themes - commerce, identity, globalisation - all over it, but more subtly than of late, and the film's elegant upholstering makes it his most enjoyable."

It "recalls the late great works of master miniaturist Claude Sautet," suggests Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

The Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm even finds it "reminds us gently and persuasively of the films of the great Renoir."

Online listening tip. The Observer's Jason Solomons talks with Assayas.

Earlier: Daniel Kasman (Auteurs' Notebook) and Karina Longworth (SpoutBlog).

Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2008 5:44 AM