Les témoins 2007

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Techine's graceful, forceful drama has the tact not to play narrative games with its subject. Read more

Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times: An ambling narrative, but an atmospheric one that feels authentic despite its unlikely character pairings. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: What the characters in The Witnesses -- and the audience -- pay testimony to in Andre Techine's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: Andre Techine's The Witnesses is one of the finest fiction-film accounts of a free yet frightful moment in time, when the relaxing sexual liberties of the previous decade were being squeezed by the onset of an unforgiving new virus. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Excitingly convoluted. Read more

V.A. Musetto, New York Post: Andre Techine's film features a strong ensemble cast. The film pulls no punches in its depiction of lives in crisis. Read more

Andrew Sarris, New York Observer: Andre Techine's The Witnesses (Les Temoins) treats the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, first in the United States and then spreading to the rest of the world in 1984, as a devastating medical atrocity in a war that is still raging. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: The Witnesses doesn't pay off with a great operatic pinnacle, but it's better that way. Better to show people we care about facing facts they care desperately about, without the consolation of plot mechanics. Read more

David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle: Some may think the metaphoric possibilities of an incurable illness that can be transmitted through sexual contact have been all but exhausted. Director Andre Techine almost proves otherwise in The Witnesses, a kind of film opera without music. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Director Andre Techine's story is one of subtle emotional tones that require the most of an actor, and the cast is uniformly compelling. Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Hank Sartin, Time Out: Read more

Melissa Anderson, Time Out: Read more

Deborah Young, Variety: A fast-moving, engrossing multiple-character drama that brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s into laser focus. Read more

Nathan Lee, Village Voice: Techine's triumph of compassion and craft shames the American cinema's indifference to gay history. Read more

John Anderson, Washington Post: In The Witnesses, [director] Techine levels his gaze on the '80s, an era of seeming innocence, perhaps license, and one in which biological freedom has led to a loose, even sloppily knit fabric of humanity. Read more