Le deuxième acte

... but someone should have called a halt to this before it made it to release!

Along the lines of "let's get four or five REALLY good actors (and that idiot Garrel) and get them to play a very meta scenario intermingling "real life" and "the film", and make some elliptical comments about AI, filmmaking and the state of the world along the way." Shame it doesn't really work, and it's certainly not funny. I feel sorry for the Cannes audience who presumably had to pretend they liked it on the night.

I must say that I have really enjoyed some of Quentin's earlier films (such as Mandibles and Smoking Causes Coughing) so was quite ready for something weird and, frankly, if it wasn't him I would have bailed on this fairly early on. But ultimately this came across as one of those homework essays that you produced on a Sunday night when you didn't really feel like it, but had to hand *something* in on the Monday morning, even if it was rubbish and not ready.

Hopefully his next film will be a return to form.

This was an experiment by the director like a lot of his movies like rubber, a movie where there is two kinds of people, people who take the movie seriously or a a joke and depending of what you choose, your personality traits can be define

This ls the same, i care about when i was thinking that the situation in the movie was real but when i find out that its fake and its all acting i didn't care anymore.

I was the side that didn't care, that's the experiment, we are suspects for investigation to this director, we don't matter.

This is not a real movie, it just an experiment but the experiment are supposed to have people who agree to take part, so 5/10.

The cinematography is stunning - sharp, colorful, and detailed, with a minimal editing style that emphasizes its visual clarity. The one-shot scene between the two male characters, father and daughter scene is witty and thought-provoking, showcasing the expressiveness of the actors and sharp, suspenseful dialogue.

The writing is a highlight, packed with clever jokes and punchlines that feel refreshingly honest. The characters speak their minds in a way that's both funny and relatable. However, the film's pacing feels uneven. While the minimal cuts enhance immersion in some scenes, the lack of variety in perspectives made it feel a bit static.

The film's brevity also works against it, leaving some parts underdeveloped. Worst of all is the ending, which felt pointless and left me wondering why. In short, The Second Act is a "hahaha, meh, bored" type of film. Not bad overall, but a stronger, more meaningful ending would have changed it.

What a waste of energy, a waste of resources, a waste of time, a waste of talent. Everything crumbles under the weight of the writing which is so full of clichés one thinks this too is also part of the joke. It is a film within a film whose plot never takes off, whose originality wears thin 10 minutes into the film. It is thankfully 1 hour 20 minutes, an hour too long. I must be in the minority here as the film opened the Festival de Cannes this year. The Second Act was filmed in the course of a little over two weeks and I found myself wondering how, and why, it was chosen to open the film festival.

Quentin Dupieux's movie opening this year's Cannes is a movie about a movie about...a movie? This is all typical Dupieux, questioning our reality in clever ways, and I think everything comes together rather well here.

We follow two pairs of actors heading towards a meeting at a diner, with each breaking character and the fourth wall ever more often, generating layers of reality that are usually at odds with one another. Questions are asked overtly and implicitly: does anything matter, how do we construct our reality and what about a dash of almost present-day futurism?

And to top it all off, the movie ends on one of the more meta fourth wall breaks I've ever seen, a bit of a mind-scratcher that cleverly frames the syntax of movie-making.

I think the ultimate claim of LDA is that the one undeniable real thing is what we feel. Not in "feelings are facts" kind of way, but rather in the effect we can have on other people, whether seen on unseen, quantifiable or not. 7.