Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

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

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

SnoopyStyle In French colonial Africa, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) is struggling to finish the coffee bean harvest. The rebels are approaching. French forces are leaving. Local have turned to banditry and her workers have mostly abandoned her. The African mayor bullies André Vial (Christopher Lambert) to get his father to sell the plantation. Maria has their white son Manuel and André has his half-African son Jose. Maria stubbornly refuses to leave the harvest even after Manuel is stripped naked by a couple of boys. Manuel starts to deteriorate mentally. Maria discovers wounded rebel fighter Le Boxeur in her barn.Isabelle Huppert embodies a fierce interior and stubbornness. The family's varying reaction to their situation can be mind-boggling. There is real tension but also frustration with Maria. These are maddening characters in a maddening world.

jjedif Isabelle Huppert (along with Helen Mirren, Juliette Binoche and Laura Linnie) is one of my five favorite actors (the only male on the list being Bill Murray), so I had no doubt that she could realistically play a colonial coffee farmer trying to hang on in soon-to-be post-colonial Africa.From the opening scene, there seems to be no doubt that things will turn out badly for Huppert's character. This is, after all, not war-torn Algeria portrayed in "Battle of Algiers", where the French are going to fight tenaciously to hold onto "their" land and then suddenly fold and get out of Dodge City. This is sub-Saharan Africa, and the politicians back in France know that it will be more profitable, and maybe even easier for them, to turn their colonies over to local African dictators, who can then be bought off for the benefit of French corporations and politicians. It's a win-win situation for everyone...except for the vast majority of Africans and Huppert's character. Perhaps we could let the French off the hook by saying that France couldn't have prepared their African colonies for independence if they had wanted to. But the French certainly did nothing positive in their colonies during their stay or after they left (the best we can say is that the Belgians in the Congo were much worst).This is life in the land of barely living, where the local African warlords have no background in or time for the niceties of "civilized" brutality and exploitation a la française. Huppert seems oddly out of place, a relatively nice colonist who perhaps thinks naively that she can trade on her relative niceness to survive the new and very ugly reality about to engulf her. But she is completely out of touch with the reality. She could choose to leave, unlike the Africans who work on her plantation. But she somehow thinks she has no choice but to stay even as child-soldiers wander across the countryside around here.I mainly saw "White Material" mainly because I like Isabelle Huppert acting, because one seldom sees a movie filmed in sub-Saharan Africa and because I had read Louroma's "Les Soleils des Indépendance" dealing with Ivory Coast. But I spent most of the movie hoping that when her time came, Huppert's character would take one carefully-aimed shot to head to relieve her suffering.A couple of other points. The Supplement interview with Claire Denis is well worth seeing (Isabelle Huppert's interview is okay; unfortunately the disk wouldn't let me watch the interview with Isaach de Bankolé). I was glad that the child-soldiers were not shown committing a lot of the violence in the film. And as Denis points out, the local actors were very good. I also know that not all African countries are the same, but I also wondered about whether there was a lot of violence against women during the conflict in Ivory Coast like is currently occurring every day in Congo. Still I was glad that violence against women was not shown; it wouldn't have added to the film's message or effect.

ihrtfilms Clare Denis is no stranger to setting her films in Africa and in White Material it is there we visit. In an unnamed nation, a woman walks along a dirt track trying to get a lift before eventually succeeding and as she rests we get taken back earlier to when see how she came to this point. The woman Maria is a white woman is a African country on the brink, despite warnings from those around her, as well as the French Army, desperation makes her seek out a way to finish the coffee crop on her plantation despite the ever increasing risks and threats towards the whites.As her separated husband makes a deal to sell the plantation, her workers up and leave fearful of war, but she manages to hire new staff to try and complete the task. Encouraging her teenage son to join in, he reluctantly does so only to have a horrid encounter with two young armed children, an event which leaves him desperate and altered and he goes of the rails. Maria meanwhile risks further harm by sheltering a wounded rebel leader., as the situation around her becomes more violent and dire.Denis has crafted a very good film here, one that from the outset has a sense of tension, foreboding, of the unknown and that menace is around every corner. The lush tropical surrounds stand side by side with the violence and bloodshed or innocents murdered and others fleeing for their lives. Isabelle Huppert is superb as the defiant but embattled Maria, who seemingly refuses to accept what is happening, as she states, 'things have been the same for months', self denial towards a worsening situation.The film highlights the horror of conflict, that it effects everyone, no matter what side you choose and that in some countries conflict sees no boundaries with age as we see children and young woman brandishing guns and machetes. The film pays some attention to this and the absurdity of children fighting; we see the children handle guns like experts and shoot dead innocence before gorging on sweets and sleeping the day away before they themselves succumb to the horrors of war.It is a thought provoking film one that s it progresses becomes more and more startling in it's depiction of war and the outcome is shocking and tragic to say the least. Powerful stuff.

thisissubtitledmovies excerpt, more at my location - In Claire Denis' White Material (shot in Cameroon), themes of colonialism and rebellion collide within the context of an unspecified African nation. The film is, at times, deeply disturbing and shocking, and marks Denis' filmmaking return to Africa (after previously studying themes of African colonialism in films such as her 1988 directorial debut Chocolat) whilst drawing on real-life experiences of growing up in the continent.White Material is a worthwhile and thought-provoking film, even if it does not quite reach the full sum of its parts. Isabelle Huppert is intriguingly complex and engaging in the central performance, with Nicholas Duvauchelle also shining in a difficult role as a young man descending into darkness.