I wanted to like this more than I did but there are many faults...Michael Caine is always promising, and although he gave a good performance here, he is using an American accent, which stood out like a sore thumb! His performance is pretty good nonetheless, (it's Michael Caine) but he doesn't have the best script to begin with either..Michael Caine and Clémence Poésy should be a dream working together but they're relationship is not interesting enough to hold out the 2 hour mark... (and then the last half hour goes a bit askew as well). I never felt enough for these characters to invest in them or root for them and I think that is the films biggest failing..Although the movie had all the ingredients, I was checking the time quite a bit.. The movie had some charm but I was bored by its slow pacing...Seek it out if you cant get enough of Michael Caine or Clémence Poésy, but otherwise I wouldn't be in a hurry...

the point of the film is that isolation can take place at any stage in our lives, at 25 or at 85. whatever their age, people share the same desire for company and for fulfillment, and when these vanish, we wither and vanish. this statement is the genius of the film, a fact which the film critics seem to have missed altogether. reading the reviews, you get the impression that they have not absorbed the film or analyzed it in any useful way. they repeat each other's phrases. there is no independent thought, no intellect or critical faculty applied by any of them. one critic did not even bother to watch the film (he says she is a ballet teacher). the biggest problem with the film, i would say, is its audience. the best reviews are found in the comments, which are made by amateurs.

5/10 There are only four reasons this movie doesn't get a three (or lower) out of ten: firstly, and most importantly, Michael Caine's performance: even amongst a failing movie he manages to emerge victorious in a riveting performance, which is the main and probably only reason I endured sitting in for two hours, never getting bored and actually being involved with the movie despite it trying so hardly to keep me away from itself. Clemence Poesy's performance and charisma is another reason for which you get effortlessly dragged into the narrative, yet just as quickly dragged out. The other two reasons are the calm and beautiful cinematography and the ideas the movie is trying to deal with. Yet it simply does not manage to tackle them as much as it thinks it is. The screenplay is so uneven, the drama so uninteresting and senseless, character motivations change randomly throughout and in the end the movie just feels a little too much pretentious. With the exception of the two leads the actors are actually delivering very bad performances and whenever they were talking I was cringing. The movie also relies too much on coincidence and takes too much for granted: continuously throughout it I was screaming at the screen "fuck you, how did that come to happen!?" and to this contributed a terrible editing that cut from place to place in a very weird way. The direction was all over the place and managed to make Hans Zimmer, one of the grates composer of all times, compose a dull score. Despite having some interesting, yet no really noble, intentions and two very good performances from its leads, the movie is a failure in what it wished to deliver and there is close to zero true emotion.

What starts as a very intelligent, well-acted movie about the nature of relationships and the need for connection, turns dramatically and disappointingly into a sentimental mushpile of a soap opera, and then gets worse. Extremely well-acted up to a point, the characters are fleshed out as real people and you can for the most part understand and empathize with them. Michael Caine's weird attempt at an American accent doesn't quite undermine his characterization of the professor, but it is distracting and sounds too false. He did a pretty OK American accent in Cider House Rules, but nowhere else.I was very impressed by most of this movie, including the pretty scenery, and the nicely conceived and rounded characters. About 2/3 of the way through however, it goes off the rails. Another reviewer described this movie as having sincerity, and I would agree with that up to a point. There are few false notes in the script, but when they happen they are real clunkers that drag the movie down like an anchor. This may be because the rest of the movie is so sincere and real that the false notes feel just that more false, but I don't think that's quite it.There is a very soap opera moment at around the 3/4 point which not only feels contrived, but which pulls the story in a really unsatisfying direction. While it's headed in this disastrous direction it's actually succeeding in giving the characters life in a meaningful and sincere way, but then another ridiculous plot device drives it further into the ground. And then another. And another.And the ending is just stupid. Unwatchably preposterously stupid. Given what we know these characters have gone through, and how much they've grown as human beings, it's outside the realm of believability and is antithetical to the story, erasing the purpose of the movie and voiding its intelligence with a single swipe. Worse, the movie wants you to view the ending as having the sort of lofty nobility that would cause you to leap out of your seat and applaud, which I find personally disgusting. Would that I had leaped out of my seat earlier and left. If that particular ending was in the original source material, then so much the worse for the source material because as portrayed it didn't do the movie any favors.