Critics reviews

There is a moment in Philippe Garrel's A Burning Hot Summer which stands out. . . . The scene, shot in a single take, is a rare moment of freedom in an otherwise rigid and formally austere film that it underscores just how trapped Angèle has been leading up to this moment.

Un été brûlant [A Burning Hot Summer], another great film in the director's career, marks at last the achievement of a novelistic mode in Garrel's cinema... Un été brûlant is, equally, a meditation or study (in the sense of an artist's study or copy) upon Godard's classic Le mépris [Contempt] (1963).

Elegiac memoriams are rarely this funny, pointed or pleasurable.

I have never seen a Garrel film untouched by grace, and A Burning Hot Summer is no exception. The emotional geography is more intricate than in any of his previous films but no less delicately rendered.

Mr. Garrel’s stories may be fairly straightforward, but his storytelling is purposefully oblique. He doesn’t connect the dots and instead allows you to consider each narrative fragment, every seemingly atomized scene, before moving toward the pointillist whole. Here and elsewhere you linger in moments that, like memories and dreams, can feel severed from storybook time.

Love and death couldn’t be more closely intertwined than they are in Philippe Garrel’s latest boho melodrama, and like most of the French auteur’s work, it has a near-adolescent purity of purpose in how it handles love and loss.

Garrel’s unofficial anagram of Godard’s Contempt lingers both as a tangle of stagnant and fluid yearning and as an intriguing meta-subversion of movie romance