| 100 |
Film Threat
Cantet weaves a dark, disturbing story of hedonism, casual racism and the lethal consequences of self-indulgence in his superb drama Heading South.
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| 100 |
The New York Times
A beautifully written, seamlessly directed film with award-worthy performances by Ms. Rampling and Ms. Young.
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| 100 |
Baltimore Sun
Heading South is a hydra-headed love story, as dangerous as it is heated and complex.
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| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly
A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.
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| 88 |
TV Guide
Director Laurent Cantet's fourth feature abandons the contentious French workplaces of "Human Resources" and "Time Out" for sunnier climes, but this Haitian idyll is an equally excoriating look at labor and exploitation.
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| 88 |
New York Post
Kyle Smith
The movie itself is a powerful cocktail of not just sex and love but race, poverty, colonialism and jealousy.
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| 88 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.
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| 80 |
Wall Street Journal
Laurent Cantet's fascinating, troubling drama has many meanings.
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| 80 |
Salon.com
Heading South is a seemingly straightforward and simple picture that's really defiantly complex, sexually, politically and emotionally.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
In its way, the film is a piercing indictment, though it makes its point without much screaming, hectoring or preening. It's quietly terrific.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
The film offers something unusual, a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.
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| 75 |
Portland Oregonian
Heading South is strong in bursts, but the bursts are too diffuse for its best moments to last.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Evocative and disturbing.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
The racial and sexual politics of Heading South may trouble some audiences; Cantet is definitely not a moralist in the usual sense.
|
| 70 |
The New Republic
If only Cantet and Robin Campillo (who based their screenplay on stories by Dany Lafèrriere) had balanced the sexual and political elements more acutely, the result could have been searing.
|
| 70 |
LA Weekly
An absorbing extension of Cantet's abiding obsession with the seeding of political inequality in intimate relations.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
The film tackles more than it can master, but it's never less than fascinating, and all three leads are exceptional.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought, Heading South makes its points in the first 20 minutes.
|
| 67 |
Austin Chronicle
Provocative and prodding, but apart from its queen bee Ellen (the marvelous Rampling), the characters are representational types instead of fleshed-out human beings.
|
| 63 |
Boston Globe
Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.
|
| 60 |
Los Angeles Times
Lonely, bitter, insecure and clearly unstable, the women are meant to level the emotional playing field and add depth to what is, at heart, a story about the exploitation of poor nations by rich and powerful ones. But they wind up being too bitter and unstable to elicit much sympathy.
|
| 60 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Cantet keeps a lid on a story that he could have easily exploited, but he makes his points about beauty, fulfillment, self-indulgence and delusion with a measured hand.
|
| 60 |
Variety
Jay Weissberg
Cantet's anticipated follow-up to "Time Out" supplants that pic's important issues with unexamined attitudes toward sex and the tropics.
|
| 58 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Heading South's gender politics keep the movie from being too simple, since these women's self-indulgence can be read as a kind of unfettered (and even laudable) feminism, instead of just unintentional racism.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
Among the creepiest adult monologues you'll hear in a regular theater this year comes from Karen Young in Heading South, a well-acted but misguided tale of displaced sexual longing on the beaches of Baby Doc Duvalier's 1970s Haiti.
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| 50 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Rampling is fascinating as Ellen, the aging romantic who hardens her vulnerability with a materialist philosophy regarding the buying and selling of sex. The other two actresses give more superficial performances, with Young totally unconvincing as a Southern neurotic.
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