Critics reviews

Cantet composed the script with the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes, and the Frenchman's style is the same fly-on-the-wall approach he used for his most acclaimed movie, 2008's public-education drama The Class. He fosters this seamless improvisatory air that takes you from eavesdropping to absorption.

A nausea-inducing film of simplistic primitivism... As in every self-respecting reunion there is of course a secret, which will be unveiled at the end of the film to no one's surprise (the characters themselves seem to forget about it from time to time, so brilliant is the screenplay). So there we go for 95 interminable minutes from commonplaces to bad acting, dull direction to pathetic blatancies and back again, like on a soporific and unpleasant merry-go-round.

...It's a laborious Havana-set Big Chill in which a handful of former radicals bemoan their current circumstances, trade recriminations, and seemingly begin every other sentence with some variation on the phrase "Remember that time we…?

The film gathers emotional momentum as the cowed rebels finally begin to see themselves and each other for who they are as opposed to who they were, but there's a fair degree of tedium to wade through before we get there. As yet another character begins a line with the dread words "Do you remember…", auds may feel less like they're at a south-of-the-border "Big Chill," and more like uninvited diners at a soiree where they know none of their fellow guests.