BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

ejamessnyder Cleo from 5 to 7 is a film about a young woman who is nervously awaiting the results of a medical test. She fears the worst, and we see her as she wanders the streets of Paris meeting friends and strangers, seeking distraction and consolation. The story is told in real time and I loved the idea of it when I heard about it. But I also loved the idea of Richard Linklater's 2014 film Boyhood—which I eagerly anticipated for years while it was in production—but found the end product to be a bit deficient. So would Cleo from 5 to 7 live up to my expectations?The film started out a bit slow in my opinion. I felt like I didn't really care enough about the lead character or what she was going through and found myself bored by several of the early scenes. But a funny thing happened as the film went on: I started to care! Halfway into the film I was totally enthralled. It was fascinating to watch her mood change from dread to acceptance and then back again as she met with different people and discussed her situation and saw different things and encountered different distractions throughout Paris.Additionally, there were several fun things that the filmmakers did with the camera and the editing that I don't recall ever having seen before. There were a few instances of jump cuts that I particularly enjoyed but there was also a very well-done scene in which Cleo is walking up the sidewalk, looking at strangers and recalling in her mind the faces of friends. It was edited very well and pleasing to the eye but also did a great job of showing Cleo's thoughts and emotions without the use of narration, which would not have been sufficient.The film feels very real, in a way. The narrative follows Cleo to the places she chooses to go, rather than following a standard cookie-cutter story. She could very easily have chosen a different path through Paris, or stayed at home, but this is where she went and that is where we follow her. And all the characters she meets feel totally unique and very much like real people. At times it feels as if we could be following a real woman through Paris, unaware that she's being filmed or followed.It reminded me a bit of Chris Marker's documentary film Le Joli Mai, which was filmed around the same locations at about the same time. That film was real, in that it was a documentary. This film feels almost as real. The acting seems excellent, but I'm not fluent in French so it may be a little harder for me to tell when the acting is bad or not. But that's what I love about foreign films: the acting always seems a little better than it probably is!I feel like this movie warrants an additional viewing for a few reasons. Firstly, I feel like I will be able to better appreciate the parts I thought were a little slow or boring during the first viewing. Either that, or I'll confirm my earlier assessment that they were in fact slow and boring and nothing can change that, though I doubt that is the case. Secondly, knowing how things end, I think I could gain some additional insight that I may have missed the first time around during the early scenes, in particular during the opening scene which involves an impactful tarot card reading.So, by the time it ended, Cleo from 5 to 7 had indeed lived up to my hopes and dreams. It wasn't exactly what I expected, but I enjoyed it very much and think that I will watch it again. I'd previously seen Vagabond, another of the director Agnès Varda's films. While I enjoyed that film, it didn't give me the same feeling that I got from Cleo from 5 to 7, which makes me want to see more of her work. Right now I get the feeling that she may end up becoming one of my favorite French filmmakers.It's not a perfect movie, but it's better than the majority of films I see, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys powerful, emotional dramas or French films in general.

chaos-rampant I took a walk after seeing this and felt cleansed like always after a great film, the night fresh. More so than womanhood or death, this is about having lived a life. She believes she's dying from cancer as the film begins, but of course we have to wait until the end to get the hospital results.The Tarot cards of the opening are an entry; artifice, images in place of the real thing, and yet the old woman is spontaneous enough (or contriving) to improvise a story they supposedly tell, some of it vaguely correct, some not, but a story that just so happens to hit on the problem of her suffering and unlock personal truth.The problem is desire, something we think is wrong with life. The filmmaker unveils in the early stages a marvelous space of desire, as poignant as any of Resnais' spaces on memory (the other debilitating facet of mind); the girl in a precious hat shop, safe on this side of the shop glass, gliding among and admiring trinkets we have come up with to dress life, make it more beautiful than it is. Yet of course life has an ugliness we can't dress, but that's not out there, no hat will fix it. It's the constant vexation with things not being just perfect (which is desire for them to be other than they are), a lover who is not always there, a piano player who doesn't fawn over her singing talent. It's not just her of course, at a cafe we hear people complaining about all sorts of things.What underpins this is ego, that self who must be at the center of things, the filmmaker playfully sketches this in a rehearsal scene, where as she sings, with a small pan of the camera we find her singing directly to us as if center stage for an imaginary audience, the center of attention.But there's also, along the way, a bubbly friend who is open enough about things to pose naked for a sculpting class. Another marvelous image here, a naked body which does not have to overthink its place in the room, which can freely let others take away a glimpse that they can chisel into shape, something she can give of her that she doesn't lose.It's all about the view we bring to life, the air of realization through which we see, the appearances we cultivate. This is beautifully rendered in a film-within the two girls see, a silent where a man throws away his dark glasses that obscured the way things really were to find his girl alive and well, she had just tripped, no one died. It's this easy.But how can it be easy when she's dying? The film doesn't clearly reveal, the doctor's unworried look can mean either of the two things. But of course that day will come just the same, it could be months or decades away. What's left then? Having lived a day just like this, having taken walks like these with a soldier in the park, bus rides like these through the first day of summer.This is beautiful stuff, more simple but as deep about the life of appearances and consciousness as Hiroshima mon amour. It reminds me of the cheeky Buddhist saying that explains how there has never been anything wrong from the start.Something to meditate upon.

lasttimeisaw A 90-minutes real-time experiment tracks Cléo's life from 5pm to 6:30pm (although the title indicates a 120-minutes span), directed by the reverend female Left Bank pioneer Agnès Varda, actually it is my first entrée into her oeuvre. Cléo (short for Cleopatra, Marchand) is an uprising singer, who is going to get a test report from her doctor of whether or not she has cancer, the film records the exact time she spends before receiving the result. Beginning from an ominous Tarot card augury (the cards is the only part shot in color), Cléo descends into upset and despair, solaced by her assistant Angèle (Davray) and a fur hat bought in a millinery, they return home and Cléo has a brief moment with her preoccupied lover (de Vilallonga), then arrives the pianist Bob (the composer Legrand himself) and the lyricist (Korber), they rehearse a poignant rendition of SANS TOI (a majestic one-take close-up of Marchand's emotive exuberance). Afterwards, Cléo meets her friend Dorothée (Blanck), who poses as a nude model in a sculpture studio, together they watch a silent comedy short (starring Godard, Karina, Brialy, Constantine and Frey, which is a welcome highlight against the seemingly unpremeditatedly arranged text). Wandering in a park, Cléo meets a young soldier Antoine (Bourseiller), unexpectedly they establish a sincere conversation and he accompanies her to the hospital, where Cléo acquires the results while Antoine is going to the Algerian War the next day. Throughout the film, Varda conspicuously edits into the montages of passers-by on the street, in the cafeteria or on the bus, tellingly attests its "realness" in her modus operandi, which delineates the winsome picturesqueness of Paris at then, projects a strong sense of objectivity albeit its dramatized content, a young woman's inner state when she is facing the most stressing and gnawing 90 minutes of her life, waiting for a call from death or a near-miss joke.With three people billed as the cinematographers, the film actually adheres to a consistent effort of modulating the tonality of a laid-back documenting stance, although it is not a groundbreaking sleight of hand as the long-take stunt of real-time shooting in Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian ARK (2002, 7/10), frankly it is a bad comparison since Varda's work is made ages ago. Most importantly CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 still remains its distinctive élan of being a French New Wave prose and positively enchanting with its loosely organized language to keep the story intact.

K Bunck Cleo form 5 to 7, is a poignant tale of a young singer, who must face her own possible mortality before she is ready. The film starts with Cleo visiting a fortune teller's office, where we find that, Cleo who is waiting for the results of a doctor's test, will experience a major life change soon. Unknown to Cleo, the fortune teller speaks in an aside to the audience, and predicts that Cleo has cancer. This film which runs one and a half hours, and literally spans one and a half hours, is basically a journey that Cleo takes. It is in the moment that Cleo faces her deepest fears that she realizes she has no true friends. Scared of her possible test results, instead of spending the time with friends and family, she spends it wandering around Paris, and with a soldier on leave. Neither her companion, lover, friend, or producers, can understand what she is going through. Cleo may at first choose not to burden her friends with her problems, but the longer she tours Paris the more she realizes that a true friend would be there with her, she wouldn't have to worry about annoying them with her problems, and she would know that they would always have an open ear for her. It is as she walks around a park in Paris that she meets a young soldier on leave who will be going back to fight soon. To Cleo, although it may seem as simple as pouring her problems onto a man she will never have to see again, if she so desires; she is really unconsciously choosing this stranger over all the people in her life. She may subconsciously believe that the soldier know what it is like to be scared and alone, and may believe that he will best sympathize with her problems, since he too has felt fear, as opposed to her other friends, who basically live the golden life.