Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Many scenes use one-point perspective a la Kubrick, and checkerboard floors to emphasize depth. The scenes especially in the kitchen are suggestive of Vermeer's domestic interiors. But maybe that's just me on a bit of a stretch.

Slice of life drama? If one wants to use the term. It is a strange aesthetic to portray monotony by boring the pants off of your audience. But 'portray' is perhaps the wrong word. It is a representation or a portrayal only insofar as it's a film. There is little mediation. A scene where Madame Dielman ascends to her floor in the elevator is given in real time. Why? The 'Odyssey' does not take 10 years to read.

The film would benefit from an extreme cut from its 3 hours and 22 minutes to something like 90 minutes to satisfy the connoisseurs. I would suggest more radical fast cutting, and the use of hip hop montage, to get the film down to a manageable short of 15 minutes or thereabouts. And then it would be fixed.

It is an excruciating watch. I watched it over three legs. I was curious. But its inaction is depressing and vexing. To resolve this bout of nothing the writer/director Chantal Akerman resorts to melodrama.

I find films like this very hard to rate. It is difficult to say anything new or astute about 'Jeanne Dielman.' Unbelievable as it sounds this film was well-received, and is, it seems, objectively significant in the history of cinema. In fact, it has recently been elevated to Sight & Sound's "greatest film of all time." The emperor's new clothes, anybody? Of course.

I think it is awful. So a two. No, actually on reflection, a one.

The ultimate tragedy of the film is that everyone you see through its lens is trapped in the 1970s.

You've formed some habits over years of being alone, transactions that take you, towards the gloam, characteristic of your standing, excepting afternoon transplanting, it's as rigid and as set, as a millstone. A subtle change seems to upset the fine-tuned balance, it's got you searching inwardly, looking askance, the equilibrium disturbed, there are things need to be curbed, it's got you wandering around, locked in a trance.

After 30 minutes of uncomfortable fidget I started to become tuned into the monotony of Jeanne's existence and only subsequently struggled with the final half hour, although the ending perked me up. If nothing else this film has the power to get you thinking of your insignificance and, possibly, the chance of you doing something about it.

This movie is deliberately different, all in the service of telling us something we didn't know.

Movies are about movies. The borrow plot, character, lighting, sound editing and camera angles from what went before. Since "Birth of a Nation" introduced close-ups, cross cutting and cutaways in 1915 everyone has adopted that vocabulary for story telling. This movie throws all that out: The camera is fixed and stares at a scene for a very long time. Scenes had to be performed all the way through when they were filmed, because each was done in a single shot.

Movies use telescoping of time to compress the happenings of a long period into two hours. This movie tries to avoid that, depicting mundane tasks in their entirety. We watch Jeanne Dielman prepare a meatloaf, step by step, wash the dishes (her back is to us!), smooth the bed, or go shopping.

Movie use facial expressions to express feelings. Spoiler alert: When we get strong facial expressions from Jeanne Dielman there is a very good reason. And that only happens once in a three-hour, 21 minute film.

Movies use broad strokes to carry the audience along. Spiderman supplements explosions with 3D to keep me occupied. By contrast, this film uses subtle changes. You must watch closely to see what happens.

Most movies come to you. This movie requires you go to it. If there is dullness it is among those viewers who think that because they don't get something it's not there to get. There is plenty here but instead of being served to you it has to be harvested. And it is very fresh.

To see during 3 and half hours a middle aged woman silently executing the same household works over and over again is one thing. But to realize that this tired looking single mother is virtually cut out of the rest of society and hardly has an occasion of interacting with her fellow citizen, except routinely visiting teenage son and occasional sexual partners, is completely another thing. Once we notice this obvious fact, every act of repetitive domestic task is suddenly becoming painful to contemplate, strangely too familiar for many of us to dismiss simply as monotonous and insipid. All depends on your sensibility to such an existence. Some might find it to be trivial, pretending every woman is more or less supposed to do so since the Creation. Others might spontaneously feel a deep sympathy for her, a prisoner of one's own occupation unable to cope with a deepening void left by the irreversible passage of time, with a growing sense of non-fulfillment.

Apparently, this cinematographic study of housewife's social condition was first intended to be politically engaging at its release, and rightly so, seeing the socio-cultural contexts of 70s. But categorizing it simply as a pioneer of feminist film making, one would miss more essential values this experimental work may embody. If we feel a lingering melancholy and a vague sorrow toward the secluded existence of the protagonist, her solitary acts of peeling vegetables, boiling water, or mechanically making love with men for living... it is probably not because this is a mere depiction of women's status which one hope to be improved in more egalitarian society. We find here something much more deep seated in the modern men's existence in general, namely the social condition of laborers trapped by a particular mode of occupation, gradually and ineluctably losing any clue of human communication as well as the conviction of one's own destiny, without really knowing why.

I can safely say that I have never seen cinema like this before! Set out over a three-day period, we see widowed mother, Jeanne Dielman, go through her daily routine, many tasks played out in real time, the camera stubbornly static, and often, moreso earlier in the film, at waist-height looking upwards, so that Jeanne's head and shoulders frequently disappear out of shot. At first, watching these actions performed in full seems a touch unnerving - this is something that many people have carried out hundreds of times, but we have never before been forced to pay attention to the monotony of daily chores in such detail. However, holding these shots for so long draws the viewer in even further, making them concentrate on every action, so that when even the smallest cracks appear in Jeanne's monotonous routine, it appears to be almost earth shattering, just as the effect this has on Jeanne is equally momentous.

The wonderful Delphine Seyrig here plays Jeanne with an astonishing subtlety and restraint, almost emotionless throughout the three hours and twenty minutes of running time, yet it remains one of the most affecting, powerful performances that I have seen in cinema.