It's Only the End of the World's reviews
Media reviews
The Guardian
Xavier Dolan?s 'It?s Only the End of the World' is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness ? and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.
Variety
Here, in cinema?s most unpleasant genre (the dysfunctional family gathering), Dolan has found a way to exasperate and exhaust his audience, but he has also achieved a completely unexpected catharsis at the end of an agonizing hour and a half.
The Wrap
Dolan shoots in tightly held close-ups, forgoing spatial staging for the immediate pleasures of fabric and light. Whereas similar imagery filled his previous films with energy and life, here it just makes the somber piece feel more claustrophobic and inert.
The Playlist
Dolan?s usually exuberant egotism is here taken so seriously that what we?re left with is a shrieking bore, without a single character worth rooting for, least of all the puddle of maudlin self-pity at its center.
Time Out
Unfortunately, because it's so cinematically inert, all that craft and talent seems wasted. Let's hope his next film sees him working on another Dolan original.
The Hollywood Reporter
The director finds himself stymied by weak source material ? Jean-Luc Lagarce's 1990 play about a young man who returns home to tell his family he's dying ? and only intermittently well served by his starry French cast.
Festival Internacional de Cine de Lanzarote