Prodigious auteur Xavier Dolan (‘Mommy’, ‘Matthias and Maxime’) comes of age with his dazzling sixth film ‘It’s Only the End of the World’ featuring an all-star cast of top French actors.
After 12 years of absence, a writer goes back to his hometown, planning on announcing to his family that he is dying. However, his mother (Nathalie Baye), tempestuous siblings (Vincent Cassel and Léa Seydoux) and beleaguered sister-in-law (Marion Cotillard) have their own personal grievances to air. As buried resentments threaten to surface and fits and feuds begin to unfold, all attempts at empathy are sabotaged by the family’s inability to listen and love.
Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes 2016, ‘It’s Only the End of the World’ is a bold and stylistically daring melodrama performed with thunderous emotion. Taut, tense and packed with explosive performances shot in claustrophobic close-up, it further confirms Dolan as one of the most singular talents in world cinema. His film was also a surprise winner of three prestigious César Awards in 2017, including Best Director and Best Actor (Gaspard Ulliel).
★★★★ “A brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
★★★★ “The actors, all tremendous, make the film sing” – Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
