One Day You'll Understand contains no great revelations or surprises, but rather is suffused with a quiet glow of sympathy and enlightenment.
Comment
10/31/08
One Day You'll Understand (2008)
63
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:19
Fresh:12
Rotten:7
Average Rating:6.4/10
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Paris, 1987. As the trial of Lyon’s Gestapo head Klaus Barbie plays out on television, French businessman Victor Bastien (Hippolyte Girardot) finds himself distracted from his work... [More]
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Dominique Blanc
Director: Amos Gitai
Reviews for One Day You'll Understand
1 - 19 (sorted by fresh rating; UK critics are listed first)
Top CriticNonetheless, this mesmerizing, flawed, almost Proustian meditation has more to do with the present than the past.
11/07/08
The casting of 80-year-old Jeanne Moreau provides much of the raison d’être for the project. It is only the latest manifestation of the deep respect the French cinema has always shown for its aging actresses and actors.
10/29/08
Drama about a French Jewish family's suffering, secrets, and denials regarding Nazi persecution during the French Occupation is an often disorienting collage of memory shards. But the legendary Jeanne Moreau and other excellent cast help hold interest.
10/30/08
This is not a movie of big, dramatic revelations; in fact, the notionally elusive truth is pretty obvious from the movie's outset, which makes Victor's quest less about facts and more about principles.
11/13/08
[A] counterintuitive, diligently understated exploration of the legacy of anti-Semitism in a mixed-religion, middle-class French family.
10/29/08
One Day reaches an emotional level well above Gitai's typical remove.
10/30/08
Despite the back and forth between awkward and moving, unsubtle and touching, Gitai does make a strong case for personal reexaminations of the past.
10/31/08
Once again, veteran Israeli director Amos Gitai has made a subtle yet powerful and moving film on an aspect of Jewish experience.
10/03/08
Top CriticOne Day You'll Understand is not exclusively a picture about the Holocaust. It is about a contradiction: human discomfort with some truths and human hunger for them.
11/20/08
The film is to be seen for Moreau, a French national treasure, who gives a beautiful, understated performance that transcends the derivative story.
10/31/08
[Director] Gitai works here from Jérôme Clément’s 2005 book about his mother. He whips something rich and delicate out of the story’s dramatic spareness.
07/23/09
In under 20 minutes of screen time, Jeanne Moreau supplies One Day You'll Understand with an otherwise absent emotional weight of reconciliation to the anguished history of WWII France.
10/26/08
...Gitai's penchant for going off on head-scratching tangents is certainly in full force here.
09/08/08
Accurate in imaging the mystery of man's not fully knowable past, 'One Day You'll Understand' leaves too much distant, unsolved and confused.
10/30/08
The chance to watch the grand Jeanne Moreau is this flat memoir's saving grace.
12/05/08
Top CriticInert performances, an irritating soundtrack, and the lack of resonance of the 'big secret' combine to make viewing a burden.
10/14/08
Israeli director Amos Gitai can be one of the world's most graceful and effective filmmakers, but he's equally susceptible to ham-fisted episodes, and his new film is one of them.
11/06/08
The intelligence and commitment of One Day You'll Understand can't be doubted, but as drama, the film barely registers.
02/27/09
1 - 19 (sorted by fresh rating; UK critics are listed first)
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