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I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG
Il y a longtemps que je t'aime
France 2008 (M)

Kristin Scott Thomas gets one of her best roles in ages in this sombre account of a woman coming to terms with her past and present isolation.
She's never looked more ethereal than she does as Juliette, a woman who's been mysteriously separated from her family for years. Now younger sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) has effected a rapprochement and brought Juliette back to live with her husband and two young daughters. We can guess that she's been in prison, though her crime is revealed only by degrees; what writer-director Philippe Claudel does superbly is to map the slow thawing of the icy chip at her heart.
Both Scott Thomas and Zylberstein are tremendous as the sisters (they're also a convincing physical match), but the screenplay feels choppy and episodic where one hoped for dramatic momentum. Despite her burden of guilt, Juliette is not the pariah she might have been– almost everyone's very sympathetic to her.

112 minutes
Classification: (M) Mature themes

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SUMMER HOURS
L'heure d'été
France 2008 (M)

Summer Hours is the kind of film that could only have been made in France, not just because the houses are so enviable and the clothes so elegant, but because it's an uncompromising, grown-up drama in which educated, middle-class people consider a complex moral issue with barely a cross word, let alone a gun battle or a ravenous zombie. It flags towards the end, but for much of the time Olivier Assayas's film is mature, humane and unshowy.
Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche and Jérémie Renier star as three siblings who have to decide what to do with their rambling family home when their mother dies. Their great uncle was a well-known painter, so the question is whether they should honour him and their own heritage by keeping the estate together, or whether to sell off the house and its contents piecemeal. Berling believes they should preserve everything for their children, but Binoche and Renier both now live abroad and so for them the house, like France itself, belongs in the past. Partially funded by the Musée d'Orsay, Summer Hours debates the value of art and the purpose of museums, but it's also a touching universal story of loss, and a detailed portrait of a family that's close but not as close as it once used to be.

99 minutes
Classification: (M) Drug references