Don't listen to the negative reviews

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The story is familiar. because the portrait of dysfunctional family is not rare in the cinema of last decades. but the film has a fundamental virtue - it is a Xavier Dolan work. and that change everything. because not the conflicts, vulnerabilities, isolation, angry and fears, the return of the son are the basic aspects. but the precise and not comfortable image of loneliness. using admirable cinematography. the right actors. the close up. the forceof silence. the small gestures and shadows of memories. the admirable cold dialogues. and the last part as ideal building for a search who becomes out of target. a film who impress. not only for artistic value. but for remarkable science to present the things who are out of us being inside us. frustrations, intentions, the desire to be far by the other who could represent only the stranger. who is just an accident. so, a beautiful Xavier Dolan.

In the 1990s, Louis (Gaspard Ullilel) is a gay man in his thirties who is a successful playwright in Paris. After a long absence from his family, he returns to the small town where he grew up in order to tell them of a serious health situation. Once there, past family dysfunction is brought to the surface again. The film is based on the play by Jean-Luc Lagarce.The relatives greeting Louis are his mother (Nathalie Baye), his older brother (Vincent Cassel), his brother's wife (Marion Cotillard) whom he is meeting for the first time, and his much younger sister (Léa Seydoux) who was a child when he last saw her. The best scenes are when Louis is one-on-one with each of the women. Among them, there is genuine awkwardness that tries, not always successfully, to hide the feelings of abandonment due to Louis' absence.The scene between Louis and his brother Antoine, however, is not so successful. Antoine is in a constant fit of rage and resentment. While Cassel plays the part well (though rather miscast as he is eighteen years older than Ulliel), the characterization feels incomplete.It's easy to compare Antoine to the Eddie Maresan character in "Happy Go-Lucky". But while each are enraged by life, the angry character is more easily understood in "Happy Go-Lucky" than in this film.In the beginning, one might have thought that Louis's being gay was the reason for his estrangement but the family seems okay about this. There's no indication of past or present homophobia. It's most likely the bad relations, especially those of his brother, that would probably cause anyone to flee.There is much to ponder in this film and it is very well acted by a fine cast. It is a good film but could have been much better if the character of Antoine was more explored.

I just watched the Xavier Dolan film: "Juste la fin du monde". It is strange one...in the good sense of "stange"! The main character is a guy who come back home after 12 years absence to announce for his inevitable death to the family. What he is dying from, why he has left home in the first place...so many questions and so little answers. The whole movie has an atmosphere of something ...something from the past. Like a puzzle Dolan gives to the audience piece by piece the parts of the story, and at the end you being left full with questions and with one feeling of inevitability. The family is strange and in the same time so ordinary. The characters are very complicated - they don't know what to say or do, they are wavering over every possible feelings, they are terrified from the reality, they got angry at each other and to the world at the same time, deeply unhappy, each of them stuck into his/ hers personal hell... And actually it is an amazing film. I highly recommend it to all fans of European cinema.

Canne's 2016 Grand Prize of the Jury winner, Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan's sixth feature, IT'S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD is based on Jean-Luc Lagarce's semi-autobiographical theatrical piece, and its closest reference within Dolan's canon is TOM AT THE FARM (2013), adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard's play, a throbbing drama predominately enclosed within a single household. And this time, Dolan goes even further, not only the story is almost exclusively locked inside a family house with five characters, the time-frame is also condensed just within a few hours (bar some sketchy flashback). In the opening monologue, inside a plane, Louise (Ulliel), a 34-year-old writer, confesses his impending death (from an unspecified disease), and the destination of his trip, to visit his family which he has left 12 years old for the first time. At first, it seems Dolan expunges any signifiers of digital technology to avoid signposting a specific time for the story, it could happen well in early 90s when Lagarce wrote the play, or in current days, but when DRAGOSTEA DIN TEI merrily pops up, the effort dissipates immediately, yet, a more relevant distinction is the once-tabooed homosexuality has taken a back seat in the narrative (dissimilar to TOM AT THE FARM), instead, Dolan archly toys with his opening gambit: Louis is going to drop the bomb onto his kin, and god knows how they will react?In the ensuing over-deliberate familial wrangle, this tantalizing question which is blatantly deployed as a trigger of viewers' curiosity, has ultimately evaded the drama, what Dolan musters is a series of bromide-suffusing tête-à-têtes between Louis and his mother Martine (Baye), younger sister Suzanne (Seydoux), elder brother Antoine (Cassel) and Catherine (Cotillard), Antoine's wife, the sister-in-law he has never met hitherto, and at other time, a cacophony of the usual suspects generates on its own, meanwhile Louis remains excruciatingly tight-lipped through and through. A gaunt-looking Gaspard Ulliel gives a commendable performance, straitjacketed in his diction, the character is solely built on affective miens and minute gestures which demands taxing physical effort to pad out the lacunae in Dolan's meditative close-ups (Dolan really loves Ulliel's model- contour and blues-imbued visage) and what's more incredible is Ulliel instills a visceral pang of agony into Louis' perturbed psyche in the face of a massively elliptical story-line. Vincent Cassel, as ever so rebarbative in beastly aggro, gets an about-face display of bravura in the blistering altercation consummated near the finish-line, don't judge the book by its cover, never, his Antoine is another victim in the aftermath. Léa Seydoux and Nathalie Baye, both send up impressive theatrics of trivial verbosity and rapier-like acrimony to an exuberant extent. Which leaves Marion Cotillard's Catherine, being the only outsider in their bloodline, engages with a more discombobulated outlook in her timorous muttering and courteous self-consciousness, which is not a big stretch for the Oscar-winner, maybe that's why Dolan compensates with overlong glamour gaze into Catherine's dew-eyed comeliness (why will she marry a brute like Antoine, one cannot help wondering?), playing out tacitly with Louis' soulful kindness. We have only been granted sporadic glances into Louis' past in between (in the form of Dolan's emblematic slo-motion, moist and smoky grandeur), there is no buried secrets to be disinterred, no irreconcilable feud running in consanguinity, we have no idea neither what pushed Louis away from home years ago nor what has been keeping him from divulging his tidings now, yes, human emotions are sophisticated, but they are inherently follows certain logical pattern no matter who flimsy it could be, if it is Dolan's intention to obfuscate and equivocate and leave us to pattern the jigsaw, he has done a splendid job. Opening with Camille's poignant HOME IS WHERE IT HURTS and rounding off with Moby's nostalgia-infused NATURAL BLUES, Dolan's latest offering is a tad shambolic in bootstrapping its central drama and overindulges in its artistic license which is dwarfed in front of TOM AT THE FARM or MOMMY (2014), but on the other hand, it doesn't veers into narcissism and smugness as unbearable as in HEARTBEATS (2010), a middle-road residing might not be a bad thing to cool down Dolan's hyped auteur-status, so we might be more poised for another incandescence along the line, inevitably.