Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

See what’s playing

Critics reviews

DOWN THERE

Chantal Akerman France, 2006
Jonathan Rosenbaum has often noted the influence of Edward Hopper on Akerman's work, which is most apparent in her images of empty interiors. DOWN THERE—like her early works LA CHAMBRE and HOTEL MOTEREY—is full of such images, and they are often beautiful to behold, as Akerman's lighting and mise-en-scene communicate malaise and vulnerability no less precisely than the narration does.
August 12, 2016
Read full article
The movie is striking but reveals more about the filmmaker's fragile state of mind than about the milieu.
August 11, 2016
The New York Times
Echoing that of J. K. Huysmans's 19th-century novel, the movie's French title, "Là-Bas," has intimations of damnation as well as depression. What's remarkable is the degree to which Ms. Akerman uses the interplay of place and displacement to wrest beauty from despair.
April 15, 2016
The results are exquisite and darkly philosophical... The metaphorical force of her obscured vistas becomes clear as Akerman's life imitates her art: she sleeps through a suicide bombing committed at a beachfront café a short walk from her flat. When she goes to that beach, the stunningly pictorial seascapes she composes, reminiscent of paintings by Seurat and Courbet, suggest the agonized state of permanent exile that she alludes to in her voice-over monologue...
April 15, 2016
Akerman's meticulous, fixed-camera compositions — her signature — assume an even greater geometrical precision here, for the outside view is obscured by the matchstick roll-up blinds in her temporary lodging. The evenly spaced horizontal lines of the thin slats impose an austere visual order, in contrast to the anguish and chaotic feelings expressed, no matter how affectlessly, in Akerman's first-person voiceover narration: "I have fallen apart."
April 14, 2016
If our sense of reality, all appearance and disappearance, is based on the disappearance of time, Akerman's cinema by giving time the leading role, by making it visible, creates a monstrous (non-human) image of an additional reality: an image that occasionally becomes unbearable, a too much to bear for our common perception; an image that paralyses vision commonly understood as orientation and action and that invites instead intuition, in the Bergsonian sense of a deep apprehension of duration.
July 1, 2013
It's impossible to look at Là-bas and not recall the wall of windows and the changing light in Michael Snow's Wavelength, a connection reinforced by the qualities of the image produced by Akerman's low-end DV camera, particularly its flattening of the space so that the view from the window has the look of a late Cézanne where depth and surface become one. Akerman takes the aesthetic strategies of the minimalists and marries them to the humanist content that they suppressed.
May 1, 2007