Recensioni de* critic*

Sundown is a film full of narrative and emotional surprises, upending the middle-aged bloke having a midlife crisis storyline, with Yves Cape’s cinematography capturing the classy and mundane locations with equally seductive attributes. Roth and Franco’s second rodeo is a melancholic banger.

It’s a smart, engaging drama that will first frustrate some viewers looking for something more traditional and then anger the folks who feel the final scenes reduce some of the film’s intriguing ambiguity. I found it a bit minor... but also immensely watchable.

Sundown is slow, methodical, and meticulously constructed to keep us off-balance when each new revelation surfaces... The result is an introspective character study caught against a gorgeous yet volatile backdrop.

A blueprint for lean storytelling unravelling in just over an hour, Sundown just might change your life. Louche, snarky and yet utterly devastating [the film] is all about serendipity – how life suddenly falls into place and then out again.

Although a low-key arthouse affair... top notch lead performances from Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg assist in keeping this discomforting elegy on a constant simmer. Despite its simplicity, Franco’s subtexts on elitism and karmic retribution bolster the narrative significantly, once again proving his ability to disgruntle and unnerve.

Sundown, in its way, is just as transgressive [as Franco's New Order]. It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.

The high-minded director’s most successful film to date, conceptually speaking, “Sundown” is an intricate, unconventional puzzle — a mystery, complete with murder, in which the solution isn’t nearly so important as the process of putting it all together.

Sundown is a family meltdown drama that seess Franco veer close to Michael Haneke in his clinical observation of bourgeois fault lines. But the film shares another characteristic with the Austrian director’s work in that it’s at its best when being infuriatingly reticent, and at its weakest when forced to offer some sort of explanation.

The viewer is kept at a distance from the characters, but that distance is more intriguing than alienating: rather than being in the thick of events, we’re catching tantalizing glimpses of them... The end credits start rolling after 75 minutes, but an astounding amount has happened.

Thinking back to “Chronic,” Franco’s first English-language effort... the dialogue with “Sundown” is strong. Both wrestle with what it means to live and die on one’s own terms, or to have that option truncated by a twisted turn of fate. “Sundown” doesn’t subvert what we’ve come to expect from Franco’s work, but it is still a distinctively cerebral rumination.

[The film's] intensity burns like the sun which makes Neil’s skin blister, peeling off a layer we hope might reveal more. Franco is scratching away at the surface, too, making the sort of movie you come away from with questions, wondering if you’d blinked and missed something.

The story reverberates with the elegiac tone of Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano in its mixture of death, drunkenness and emotional estrangement in Acapulco. It is a very sad film that not all viewers will be anxious to spend time with, and it is a mysterious one that requires thought to understand what is going on onscreen.