Critics reviews

We’re unlikely to witness such brutal honesty about the clash of art and politics in any other movie this year.

These are all interesting, moving ideas, but they’re all just kind of hanging out in The Truth, drawing attention to themselves without ever really developing in a way that doesn’t feel manufactured.

“The Truth” doesn’t have very much of a plot. What little there is serves as a clothesline for its two excellent leads to hang their performances out to dry. This very entertaining movie is all about its women, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, actresses and mentors and best friends whose relationship has gone downhill for reasons about to be unearthed.

Kore-eda wittily toys with Deneuve’s persona, its layers and meanings.

It’s this extraordinary dramatization of France’s crucial generational divide, and its cinematic implications, that gives “The Truth” its resonance beyond the emotional specifics of the drama, potent though they often are.

This low-key portrait of maternal angst, set in the French cinema industry (with Ethan Hawke as an American ringer), feels politely generic—too assured to be the work of a novice, but not detailed enough to make a strong impression.

It is very stylish, amusing work from Deneuve who comes as close to really loosening up as she is ever going to get.

The Truth consolidates the shift in Kore-eda’s recent work to looser and more conceptual plotting, but it also reaches all the way back to his second feature After Life (1998) for some wry reflections on summing up life trajectories and the practical uses of artifice.

Memory and unreliability are at the center of this masterful exploration of a classic Kore-eda theme: the way in which families construct their mythologies, often at variance with whatever truths can be rescued from a past that has been pushed and pulled, rewritten and reshaped into forms that family members can live with.

The story may suggest a filmmaker risking the trappings of French cliché, but Koreeda subverts them with a sense of humour and tenderness very much his own.