Astonishing diary film knits together the personal and political

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2023

The Super 8 Years flirts with greatness and fleetingly even achieves it, but ultimately falls victim to the limits of its medium.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 7, 2023

The Super-8 Years might not be the most focused work of Ernaux’s career, but it offers a glimpse into the kind of personal intimacy that made her so beloved. A compact and worthwhile companion to all fans of her work.

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

It’s a wisp of a thing, little more than an hour long. But Ernaux’s lucid, perceptive narration brings a more profound significance to the scrappy, amateurish reels shot by her late ex-husband, Philippe Ernaux.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 27, 2023

Ernaux’s righteous feminism is subsumed by the huffy virtue signaling of a first-world moaner who doesn’t like skiing holidays, is bored by Moroccan snake charmers and is annoyed because she didn’t get to see “the real Albania”.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 26, 2023

This is a treasurable “home movie”, a movie about home.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2023

Those who know her [Annie Ernaux] work can treat the film as an add-on to her autobiographical writing. For other viewers, it’s esoteric but still has the melancholy allure of old memories.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 22, 2023

A slim film containing multitudes: a slice of life and time, richly grained with recollective detail. The images have a deceptive, universal simplicity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 22, 2023

An astonishing personal document, as well as a spry social history of modern France.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 21, 2023

Well, it’s an interesting sidebar to the Ernaux canon.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 20, 2023

A really different kind of way to examine our memories, and a beautiful film in many ways.

| Feb 11, 2023

Her account of the contrast between the model [family life] and the tensions underneath as she's beginning her career as a fiction writer is intriguing, and she holds our attention.

| Feb 11, 2023

Readers of Nobel Prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux will find themselves on rich, fertile ground, based on the author’s home movies from the 1970s.

| Original Score: A | Jan 12, 2023

This moving, probing, beautifully written film doesn’t completely eschew nostalgia, but like Ernaux’s books, it treats the past as a prism, casting varying light depending on how, when and where it’s held.

| Dec 26, 2022

A brisk dream of 65-minutes built entirely out of her family’s super 8 camera home movies that is all fleeting memories stung with melancholy and bliss.

| Dec 24, 2022

The romantic, the familial and the geopolitical are inseparable here.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 16, 2022

The compact documentary is ultimately more an exercise for the filmmakers than it is a truly rewarding cinematic experience for the audience.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 16, 2022

As much as the film acts as a complement to Ernaux’s previously published work, it also affords a unique pleasure: moving-image evidence of the woman in that transitional moment just before and after her first three books were released.

| Dec 16, 2022

It is a privilege to be invited into the world of this peerless writer with unparalleled emotional intelligence who is brave enough to point to every part of her life that, to some extent, failed.

| Original Score: B | Dec 15, 2022

The film’s images have faded, but the memories they’ve stirred up are vivid and full of feeling.

| Dec 15, 2022