Popular reviews

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  Review by Patrick Pryor ★★★★ 2

  If young Isabelle Huppert left me for human Shrek, I'd probably brood and blow a saxophone in a window, too.

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★½ 4

  Will we ever make love again?
  I don’t know.

  The agony and ecstasy of young confused love.

  There’s not a lot happening as far as the plot goes, but I was still engaged just watching these young confused people all ricochet off of each other in their individual searches for some kind of happiness. So many cringe worthy events that reminded me of my own young stupid life.

  I’ve seen a few Gérard Depardieu movies now, but I’ve never been all that impressed with him and kinda felt like he was overrated. However, I really liked his performance in this and I also found Isabelle Huppert. utterly enthralling.

  No one’s in love anymore
  Everyone’s breaking up

  
  Cinematic Time Capsule - 1980 Ranked

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★

  The act of making love, but
  not love as the making of it,
  not love purely as the act itself;
  love as an anti-physicality, rather,
  while still remaining a love
  with one of the most strongly
  protected corporeal connections.
  The spiritual, subverting the physical.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  There is no lack of movies about sex and class like Loulou, but Pialat sets it apart through an impressive attentive eye for behavior and how he and Depardieu manages to project dynamism without betraying any narcisism (Loulou is the reverse of most Hollywood bad boys in so far the star sexual charisma is used not to smooth him out but incresing his danger). The result imbalance makes for some fascinating explorations of power. It is curious to think Huppert made Loulou and Heaven's Gate pretty much back to back as it is possible to estabilish a lot of dialogue between both.

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  Review by eugeugeug ★★★★★ 2

  This is MY neorealism!
  When you see a great movie, life and art seem inspiring- it’s an energy that must be capitalized on through work (even a certain type of constructive socializing could fit). It should not be followed up with the regular plans of living, eating, hanging, consuming other forms of media; this leads to a lost opportunity, a type of squandering. Just a reflection 10 hours after I got out of the theater feeling perfect. Anyway, I wish Loulou and Nelly all the best.

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★

  Director Maurice Pialat delivers a naturalist and seriously minded slice-of-life with this Golden Palm nominated film starring Isabelle Huppert as Nelly, a young, exhausted middle-class wife to a dull but dependable husband. The engaging handheld camerawork from Pierre-William Glenn and Jacques Loiseleux follows her leaving him for a jobless and small-time criminal named Loulou, played by Gérard Depardieu.

  The script, written by Arlette Langmann and Pialat, is superbly translated to the screen and is mainly daring in its attempts to acknowledge and analyse some comprehensive social concerns of the period. It evolves to illuminate the contradictions and complexities of adult life as Nelly's period of adjustment become defined by vagrant friends and the frequenting of low-end cafés which startup her…

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  Review by evilbjork ★★★

  The only reason I watched this movie was because of Isabelle Huppert. She's so young here and it's pretty awesome to see a whole different dimension to an actor's career. She's great and her and Gérard Depardieu work great together.

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  Review by trolleyfreak ★★★★

  Typically of Maurice Pialat, his frank approach to a subject that has often been handled on screen (relationship dynamics) is both dense and detailed, resulting in a groundbreaking drama which scathingly criticizes French society at the end of a decade.

  The intelligent, semi-improvised dialogue is wholly compelling and when placed in the mouths of two such talented actors it is delivered with the requisite power.

  A triumph..

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  Review by conor ★★★★★ 1

  Cassavetes meets Bresson. Huppert and Depardieu at the height of their craft. Desperately need more of Pialat’s masterful work in the Criterion Collection!!

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  Review by Rafael Jovine ★★★½

  So this one is on me, like, expecting a romcom starring Isabelle Huppert to be funny or romantic is the very own definition of madness. There's a better chance for a cat to smile, thats a certainty.

  That being said, this tale of a young woman who leaves her abusive relationship for an unemployed, horny man (I swear I didn't make the theme of the day!), has his moments. Those dramatic scenes that were meant to be intense, were indeed pretty well done. You feel they were getting into the punches rather than pretending to do.

  Needless to say, even though Hupper is incapable of making anyone laugh, she's a tremendous dramatic actress, especially when she's required to go full…

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  Review by Elena Lazic ★★★★★

  I somehow loved it even more on the big screen.

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  Review by James Westbrook ★★★★ 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Loulou and Nelly meet in a blur, Loulou's shaggy dog hair falling over Nelly's petite frame as the deep throb of the dance floor pulses around them. Theirs is a romance catalyzed in sex and sweat, raw animal feeling making them incapable of staying apart and smashing through the barriers of Nelly's piss ant fiance and Loulou's perpetual drift, the kind of attraction that takes over one's life. "What has [Loulou] got?" "He never stops!" Its L'Amour fou right out of a story book, the alienated bourgeois seduced by the working class wild child, worlds colliding in a non-stop fuckfest that feels destined to explode in their faces. But what happens, Maurice Pialat asks, when it doesn't end dramatically? What…