35 Shots of Rum

With a score of 96* it’s the highest rated movie on metacritic that won’t come within 3500 miles of the Kodak Theatre:

A.O. Scott, NYT: “35 Shots of Rum,” a quiet and lovely new film by the French director Claire Denis, is partly concerned with measuring that distance, the bewildering chasm between huge and tumultuous international movements and individual lives. It is self-evident that the story of Joséphine and Lionel, an African immigrant whose wife was German, is bound up in a complicated history of demographics and political economy. The fact that nearly all of the characters in this film are French while few are white is a further index of how the European landscape has changed in recent decades.

But the more salient change, the one that shapes Ms. Denis‚Äôs delicate narrative, is the one that occurs within Lionel and Jos√©phine‚Äôs relationship. It has to do with universally recognizable but nonetheless highly particular shifts in emotional weather, as a child and her parent undertake a gradual separation after years of solitary intimacy…

In its modest scope and mellow tone, “35 Shots of Rum” resembles Olivier Assayas’s “Summer Hours,” another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.

Un proph√®te, Summer Hours, 35 Shots of Rum, S√©raphine, The Beaches of Agnes. All 5 slots for Best Foreign Language Film could be filled by French movies, and they’d all be better than 5 of this year’s 10 domestic BP nominees. Easy to lose perspective when we spend time debating the merits of Star Trek vs Avatar, but the reason the Oscars have so little overlap with the best of world cinema is because American studios waste millions of dollars trying to make CGI Scrooge’s eyes look alive.

*(96, with 9 reviews, 5 perfect 100’s, nothing lower than 80)