La Douleur? Oui. Et les longueurs!

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 28, 2019

Duras's soul-stripping words are here, but little thought appears to have gone into translating them for cinema.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 22, 2019

Buoyed by an astonishing central turn by Mélanie Thierry.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2019

Pain, it turns out, can be unbearably dull.

| Original Score: C | Dec 17, 2018

Despite its pedigree, Memoir of War does not guarantee safe passage.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 30, 2018

Resolutely somber, and self-aware about its deliberately tight and opaque visual style, it's presentational more than lived, a series of filmmaking choices instead of something deeply felt and conveyed.

| Aug 23, 2018

A punch to the gut - but also remarkable for its specificity.

| Aug 21, 2018

"Memoir of War" is a movie that dreadfully empties a vast experience, that reduces colossal events to dramatic simplicities and trivializing shortcuts.

| Aug 17, 2018

One of the best films I've seen about the ways in which grief can pull a person in both directions simultaneously.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 17, 2018

Marguerite is played by Mélanie Thierry, and the performance is a devastating one: unease and confusion with nowhere to direct it.

| Aug 17, 2018

Ms. Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn't do justice to her committed performance.

| Aug 16, 2018

This isn't a movie about set-up and payoff, it's a movie about the torment of being stuck in your head, and the insoluble loneliness of walking through a crowd of people who are oblivious to your private suffering.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 16, 2018

While clearly adoring Duras's work, Finkiel doesn't credit the strength it took for her to ruthlessly detail the experience.

| Aug 15, 2018

Melanie Thierry leaps towards the front echelons of current French actresses with her riveting turn as Marguerite Duras in Emmanuel Finkiel's slow-burning Memoir of Pain (La Douleur).

| Sep 26, 2017

If, at over two hours, it is an undeniably onerous watch, that is by design: Finkiel's film certainly understands the taxing nature of sorrow.

| Sep 25, 2017