The film likely carries greatest appeal for people who can relate to the impermanence of our formative years, but Assayas doesn’t exactly lean on nostalgia to get his point across, always looking toward the future.

| Sep 12, 2023

Delicately laced with sentiment and realism, few family dramas have the capacity to wrap around and comfort us as much as this one.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 5, 2023

A profound and affecting film that is both inspiring and unforgettable.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 6, 2019

I love films which capture that atmosphere of late summer, lazy and sultry and shadowed by the coming autumn. So I found this very moving.

| Sep 6, 2018

In crafting his own objet d'art, Assayas has paid careful consideration to the fine aesthetic practiced in Taiwan, particularly that of Hou Hsiao-hsie.

| Oct 10, 2017

Avoiding easy conflict and histrionics, Summer Hours instead shows loving siblings, relatives and friends negotiating differences the best that they can.

| Aug 24, 2017

Olivier Assayas's new meditation on French domestic life, the wisely ironic Summer Hours, begins with children's games and ends with adolescent partying and pairing off -- that is, the real business of life

| Mar 17, 2015

( ... ) Summer Hours is Assayas's best film set on home turf-the one that best puts things in perspective and loudly proclaims that one must know how to shed dead skin to go on living.

| Nov 17, 2013

Has the feel, if not the look, of an old man's film, a meditation on the passing of time.

| Aug 26, 2011

...leisurely paced but intensely gripping film - which doesn't lend itself to facile capsulization - follows three generations of a French family as they prepare for the imminent death of their matriarch

| Original Score: 88/100 | Jun 2, 2010

manages a sense of genuine poignancy that never becomes sticky or sentimental

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 14, 2010

The film resonates with emotions as authentic as the details. ... And it asks us to ponder what makes the objects in our lives meaningful.

| Original Score: 9/10 | May 11, 2010

The film and its characters are smart, sincere and fully alive in ways we rarely have the opportunity to see.

| Original Score: 8/10 | May 1, 2010

... an impressionist work with a wise understanding of human nature and a bittersweet portrait of a family going separate ways...

| Apr 26, 2010

| Original Score: 0/5 | Jan 14, 2010

The [movie's] concern might feel a little old-fashioned ... but in this film it's reasonably, solemnly, and levelheadedly expressed.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 12, 2010

A subtle, flawlessly acted, keenly observed family drama and poignant meditation on memory, identity, and history in the age of postmodernism and globalization.

| Original Score: A | Dec 22, 2009

A well-constructed film about the end of a life and uncertainty about the future.

| Original Score: B | Dec 21, 2009

Surprisingly wonderful, as if Assayas finally found a space in which to stretch out.

| Dec 17, 2009

The sheer banality of the proceedings -- appraisals! attorneys! -- threatens to rob those few poignant moments of their own dramatic value.

| Dec 17, 2009