Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

smatysia Like many French movies, not a lot happens in this one. It follows a group of acquaintances for about a year. There are loves gained and lost, families who fight, and some who don't, secret affairs, and open ones, friends who sit around and talk in coffee shops, a lot of really mundane stuff. The bright spot is Virginie Ledoyen, who is just too pretty. (A cool thing is that French women seem to have discovered razors!!!) There is certainly a place for character studies, and slow-moving films. But this one failed to appeal to me on any level. Perhaps the language barrier was too much for me to overcome. I can't recommend this one.

bastard wisher I still didn't like this as much as "Demonlover" by a long stretch, but I thought it was a bit more well-executed than Irma Vep. The various aspects of Assayas's style are more fully integrated here, but I still find he has a tendency toward extended intellectual coffee shop dialogue (a la Godard) at times that I'm not crazy about, and which still doesn't mesh well with his penchant for moody visuals (in my opinion still is greatest strength). The film reminds me quite a bit of Michael Winterbottom's "Wonderland". Like that film, neither the characters nor the situations of the story are really that remarkable or interesting, but rather the movie derives it's strength from little fleeting moments. And also like Winterbottom, Assayas has an unfortunate tendency here to cut those moments slightly short. I found a number of times wanting scenes to continue longer than they did, building up more of that improvisational sense of intimacy, instead of frequently fading to black while the scene is still underway (similar to Winterbottom's "9 Songs"). Still, there are enough of those moments to make the film more than worthwhile. I definitely think it is Assayas's most approachable, warm film that I've seen. Not that I find he is necessarily a particularly cold or detached filmmaker ("Demonlover", if anything, may very well be a masterpiece of pure detachment and inhumanity, but I think that comes more from the concept of the film rather than the filmmaker, and "Irma Vep" was nothing if not a gushing love letter to his ex-wife, after all), but there seems to be a deliberate attempt in this film to capture something real and immediate, even if Assayas gets side tracked by the unfortunate boats of cerebral, intellectual café chatting.

nousya Late August, Early September (1998)Olivier Assayas created a wonderful movie about emotions about feelings, love friendship and death. How can he develop so many multidimensional characters in just one movie, show such a complexity of emotions? We are far from the mediocre habitual (French) movie that piles up betrayal and flat pretty faces. Maybe because the places, the light are familiar to me, it all feel so real, the situations are realistic and the characters exist outside the field of the camera. Beautiful music by Ali Farka Touré and amongst an excellent cast Virginie Ledoyen performs like we could never have suspected from her mediocre acting in 'The Beach' or 'Bon Voyage' Most people will not like that movie but this is the best I have seen this year.

dirk-54 STYLIZED REALISMA tremendous and moving depiction of friendship and love whose dialogue is obviously French and whose camera-verite is very Dogme 95. Through a hand-held whirl we see stunningly candid and enticingly bare portraits of the goings on and thoughts of a group of friends including all the nuances of relationships. In this regard, Assayas's film is very similar to "La Promesse" and the Dogme 95 films. But the dialogue is extremely French in that it is very dramatic and a little too perfect to be real: dialogues feature characters who engage in dialogue's where they listen and think rather than argue. Yet even this works in the films favor, making you all the more taken in by characters demonstrate such depth. The performances are remarkable and for the most part, the characters brilliantly faceted.The movie is a bit longer than it needs to be, but the subtlety of the scenes requires patient development.If you like Robert Bresson, Hal Hartley, Lars Van Trier, or Thomas Vinterburg, go see this. The style of the camerawork and the lushness of some of the lighting makes this a must see for the screen