- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100Takes one man, his children, their spouses and babies, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, her daughter, and his friends and turns it all into a masterpiece about the strange power of food - to heal, unite, exasperate.
-
100The title embraces the richness of Kechiche's beautiful film, which captures the rhythms of displacement and hardship, the bond of family meals, and even the daily routines of the magnificent women who are part of Slimane's life.
-
100An entire family chronicle, along with four decades of French social and economic history, is recapitulated as a lavish, hectic dinner, complete with music and belly dancing. It will leave you stunned and sated, having savored an intimate and sumptuous epic of elation and defeat, jealousy and tenderness, life and death, grain and fish.
-
100Given the movie's slow, careful development, I was hardly prepared for the cold-sweat suspense of the last half hour.
-
90Rather than observing this family, we feel we are part of it, and that draws us in as nothing else can.
-
88The Secret of the Grain never slows, always engages, may continue too long, but ends too soon. It is made of life itself.
-
88For me, it's a sign that a filmmaker is on to something if you love hanging out with the characters as they eat and drink and talk and reveal little bits of themselves through everyday action.
-
83The Secret Of The Grain stretches out at the relaxed pace of a seven-course meal, but at the end of it, Kechiche has squeezed the most he can out of percolating dramas within the family and he lets the audience get to know its members without needing to throw them all a subplot.
-
80Kechiche takes his time, allowing us to know the characters as if we live next door. But be warned: for those who come to feel like a member of the family, the unexpected end may seem strikingly unfair.
-
80Richly enjoyable and consistently surprising.
-
75The cast is solid, with standout performances by first-timer Habib Boufares as Slimane.
-
75The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.
-
70Escalates into visceral allegory with an abandon and cruelty that seem positively Romanian. The last 30 minutes more than redeem the preceding two hours.
-
70Kechiche digs a good story out of the flux, and, in the movie's final forty minutes, the suspense is terrific.
-
60A penchant for suffocating close-ups and an overabundance of scenes that go on far too long mar Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain, an otherwise engaging drama about an immigrant Arab family in France.
-
50An overlong, dramatically unbalanced picture whose emotional wallop gets somewhat diffused.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 3 out of 3
-
Mixed: 0 out of 3
-
Negative: 0 out of 3