It's Only the End of the World
Entertainment One | Release Date (Streaming): June 30, 2017 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
48
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 11 Critic Reviews
Positive:
1
Mixed:
10
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 20, 2016
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. Read full review
60
Screen DailyCharles GantMay 20, 2016
The film’s dialogue has ample tang of real family discourse, but it often fails to rivet. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 20, 2016
The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family. Read full review
58
The Film StageGiovanni Marchini CamiaMay 20, 2016
While he does, to an extent, stifle some of his more adolescent instincts in comparison to earlier films (e.g. Laurence Anyways and Mommy), Dolan generally appears to have mistaken maturity for joylessness. Read full review
50
TheWrapBen CrollMay 20, 2016
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. Read full review
50
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 20, 2016
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. Read full review
50
IndieWireEric KohnMay 20, 2016
[Dolan's] crafted the semblance of a substantial movie that never quite gets where it was supposed to go. Read full review
42
The PlaylistJessica KiangMay 20, 2016
Having recruited as fine a cast of French-speaking thesps as has ever been assembled, and marshalled a strong behind-the-camera team, 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. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterJon FroschMay 20, 2016
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. Read full review
40
Time Out LondonCatherine BrayMay 20, 2016
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. Read full review
40
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 20, 2016
The material is weak, overly familiar and cliché-ridden. Dolan throws the cinematic sink at it but his latest feels like a shorter, not particularly watchable sequel to August, Osage County. Read full review
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