Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

steveleach1953 I am rarely moved to comment on movies but I think that this little gem has been overlooked. This is a poignant, even beautiful movie about growing up, poverty, life in seedy housing projects and, for me, most importantly loving, giving mixed ethnic communities that nurture and support everyone. It may be a little idealized but the point is well made. Anouk Grinberg is utterly captivating as the gamine adolescent, strong and vulnerable, playing her part with an intelligence that is rare and to be cherished. The cast, including the children, play their roles with spirit and are absolutely believable. I did not find the subtitles distracting (knowing a little French helped) and let the performances speak for themselves. A remarkable little movie that has spirit, is socially relevant, even today, and brilliantly filmed. I am so glad I didn't listen to the overly negative review that was prominent on IMDb and would urge everyone with a grain of compassion to watch this movie and be moved and uplifted.

heliotropetwo Memory and longing can make of our lives a continuous present tense in which those we've lost have dinner with us, in which we can call them from the grave whenever we wish, in which we can kill them as often as we like. And if we are the pretty, hyperactive daughter of demented (Italian? Spanish?) mother and pastis-drowned father, living in a nightmare suburban project in Marseilles among the walking driftwood and the detritus of loving humanity, in which crime is a career and rape a rite of passage, we are seven, seventeen, twenty-seven in the same moment while the hybrid sounds of Euro/Algerian/Camerounian music, chewing, cursing, laughing, fighting, sexing, loving, accompany us perpetually as in the old melodrama, except that it is so alive, funny, moving, devastating and rescuing all at once that we are enthralled and left with the happy/sad feeling of a life lived. A movie to be lived in and remembered with fondness.

frankgaipa I used to look forward to Blier, I think because he knew how to surprise. Then his two regulars moved on. Patrick Dewaere died. Depardieu, working constantly and still talented, became fat and rich. Blier continued to turn out idiosyncratic works, but eventually I was reading about them in the Cahiers more often I could see them in this country.What I used to anticipate, was a single startling thought exercise transformed into an hour-and-a-half-long conversation between usually three, maybe four, at least slightly frantic individuals: Get Out Your Handkerchiefs; Buffet Froid; Beau Pere; My Best Friend's Girl; Too Beautiful for You. Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil, disappointed me a little because it lacks the earlier films' challenging premises. In it, Blier experiments with style. It's an exercise in form more than in thought. Though it surprises constantly, it poses nothing as intriguing as those older films' puzzles.Nearly everything in this film, even adults playing themselves as children and the dead getting in their two cents and more long after they're cold, is some degree of cliché. That's not to fault Blier. His title announces as much: 1…2…3…Boo! Cliché...cliché...cliché...Soleil! Drunken Pa, domineering mother, boring husband, exiting past fling, hot school teacher(Where are the rest of the girls in the class?), incapable-of-guilt bar-keeper. The surprises, and nearly the only real pleasure, come from the clichés' arrangement, from distortions in narrative order.Though it's set up mid-film, with references to the 722 door, Mastroianni's big scene at the finish struck me as a producer's move, not a director's. This wasn't Mastroianni's film. It was Anouk Grinberg's (Victorine). Any of many actors could have played his role. There was no need for the character to be Italian. Grinberg began and should have finished the film.

arthurpewty I have only seen 3 Bertrand Blier movies, but this one is easily my favorite of the 3. BUFFET FROID, starring Gerard Depardieu, was the first I saw -- and the fact that it was basically plot less and full of absurdist humor made it instantly a favored flick. I more recently saw Blier's Oscar-winning GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS but thought it was a little too conventional and strained next to the more flat-out freewheeling BUFFET. About 15 years after that pair of movies comes this one, which marries the sensibilities of the other two perfectly. Like HANDKERCHIEFS, it actually has a story, but like BUFFET, it doesn't bother with real-world logic, good taste, or linear chronology in telling that story. SOLEIL is sort of a movie about coming-of-age in the projects, sort of a movie about sexual psychology, and sort of a cut-and-pasted collage of unusual moments. The magical thing is that the damn thing winds up more moving than it probably would have if it was a straightforward tearjerker about hard living. Of course, Blier can't be credited completely for this, as his actors are wonderful, especially Anouk Grinberg as Victorine, our perpetually childish heroine, and Marcello Mastroianni as her charming perpetually drunk papa. An under-seen gem.