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100Cantet has rich insights into this material, and brings them alive through sensitive acting and powerful filmmaking.
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100There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness.
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100It's a chilly, lonely introduction to a man who has effectively stepped out of the social world of adult responsibility.
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100A hushed, small-scale masterpiece that moves into the shadowlands of tragedy.
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100Recoing gives a performance that won't soon be forgotten. Neither will Time Out. It's a great movie.
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100Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline.
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100This movie makes one grateful that a serious European art cinema still exists. [15 April 2002, p. 88]
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91Recoing's performance is chillingly low-key -- sometimes you can swear that he believes his own fictions -- and Livrozet, making his film debut, has a perfect long-in-the-tooth charm.
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90Not just an especially subtle and thoughtful psychological drama, it's a provocative, even an unnerving one as well.
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90Recoing's performance is a sensitive portrayal of a man in the throes of an excruciating spiritual crisis.
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90It has the stately, well-crafted anxiety of a Hitchcock movie, except that the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same.
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90It's like an Ingmar Bergman film with the loss of religious faith replaced with a sort of socioeconomic nebulousness.
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90Theater veteran Recoing is utterly compelling. Both the script and the resourceful, subtle actor provide enormous insight into the troubled character.
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90Vincent is played masterfully by Aurelien Recoing, who gives him a sort of as-if anomie; this haunted hero is so detached that he may not realize he has no real life to be detached from.
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90Powerful.
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88"Human Resources" was a good, straightforward tale, but Time Out is better. It's haunting. It's like a poem.
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88Cantet's script and direction are flawless, and, matched step-for-step by Jocelyn Pook's mournful score, he builds the tension to near unbearable levels.
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88Skip work to see it at the first opportunity.
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88If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.
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80Look carefully at that final scene; few happy endings have ever felt so downbeat.
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80This is brilliant filmmaking.
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80Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.
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80A subtle mood piece in which a man's collapse is examined so rigorously that one almost hopes for a murder to come along and break the tension.
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78Faultlessly truthful in its observations.
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75I admire the closing scenes of the film, which seem to ask whether our civilization offers a cure for Vincent's complaint.
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75The movie isn't a thriller, but it has the tension of a thriller, and its cool, icy tone, deliberate pacing and clean, antiseptic lines are reminiscent of Kubrick and Antonioni.
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75A well-crafted indictment of the dark side of the modern work ethic.
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75This is a documentarylike film about a man who creates a castle in the air and then moves right in, the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" of the workplace.
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75For those with the patience to sit through this kind of unhurried motion picture, Time Out offers a compelling character study of an individual under the kind of strain we can all relate to.
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50Looks great but moves like molasses, is more interesting than truly involving.