You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Released Jun 7, 2013

1h 55m

Drama

List

86%

35 Reviews

Tomatometer

59%

250+ Ratings

Audience Score

A who's-who of French actors are summoned to hear the reading of a playwright's last will and testament. They are asked to view a recording of a play in which all have starred over the years, and as video rolls, they all act out their old roles.

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Amy Taubin

Film Comment Magazine

Resnais breaches multiple conventional boundaries- between ancient and modern, theater and film, and even life and death-and embraces digital postproduction to create a marvelously fluid cinematic space that extends his lifelong surrealist project.

Aug 27, 2019

Full Review

Stanley Kauffmann

The New Republic

What affects us most is Resnais's ingenious idea. And that affect is magnified by a surprise ending.

Jul 12, 2013

Full Review

Gary Goldstein

Los Angeles Times

Resnais' occasional use of split-screen and other traditional special effects enhances the picture's various dualities, dreamy quality and decided staginess.

Rated: 3/5

Jul 5, 2013

Full Review

CJ Sheu

Critics at Large

Resnais displays an immaculate instinct for when to use which actors, ... and [how to use sound] to elicit the emotions that on stage would emerge from variations in volume.

Jun 30, 2020

Full Review

David Phelps

MUBI

Among other things, the movie serves as a kind of rehearsal for an elegy, enacted in various permutations not because of memory's regenerative warp and woof after the fact, but because of imagination's possibilities before anything has ever happened.

Oct 26, 2018

Full Review

Blake Williams

Cinema Scope

... there was a wholly unwarranted air of the posthumous about You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, which is as eccentric and alive as its immediate predecessor.

Nov 18, 2017

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walter m

In "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," famed playwright Antoine d'Anthac(Denis Podalydes) has died. His last request is for some of his favorite actors and other creative collaborators to meet at his house. What he would like them to do is judge a new version of his play "Eurydice" performed by a warehouse theatre group who apparently spent most of their budget on a cool looking pendulum. Even with one seriously wonky framing sequence, director Alain Resnais, with his penultimate film "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," turns two of his favorite obsessions, theatre and surrealism, into a mindblowing experience. Throughout the body of the movie, with a little help from split screen, he seamlessly combines three productions of a play(starring Sabine Azema & Pierre Arditi, Anne Consigny & Lambert Wilson and Vimala Pons & Sylvain Dieuaide respectively) that occasionally inhabit the same space.(Thus proving we have to find out to how to clone Mathieu Amalric.) This is no mere experiment as it allows the viewer to not only see the differences in various adaptations but more specifically in how the actors interpret the work.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

I expected so much from this film that I watched it twice thinking I must have missed "something" the first time through -- but, for me, this film was really much ado about "nothin'"

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

02/22/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Anyone who likes this is desperate to be recognized in an obscure light. The above ratings of 83 and 65 are a total farce. This was wasted celluloid.

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

01/12/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Man, before popping this in, I had no idea director Alain Resnais was also the dude behind such influential classics as "Night and Fog" (1955), "Hiroshima Mon Amour" (1959) and "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961). It makes me wish I liked his most recent, "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet", more. I would never have guessed this was the work of a 91-year-old master. Now I feel like a true piece of shit. I wanted to rate this a tad higher because Resnais uses some impressive long takes throughout "Nothin'", highlighting especially the facial expressions and hair of his actors as they go on long spiels about life, love and death, but then the ending happened and I was just completely soured to the whole enterprise. Really truly, I'm sorry, but I thought the wraparound here was downright atrocious. Considering we're barely ever introduced to any of the characters -- a group of friends who gather at the home of a recently-deceased acquaintance and end up reciting a late reading by the former playwright, a loose interpretation of the Greek myth of lovers Orpheus and Eurydice -- the final twist is completely unbelievable, which is, you know, whatever, but without spoiling it, it's irritating mostly for just being plain fucking shitty of the person involved. And the script by Resnais and Laurent Herbiet -- inspired by dramatist Jean Anouilh's "Eurydice" and "Cher Antoine ou l'Amour raté" -- is stuffed with so much painfully pretentious, strenuously jokey dialogue I'd say I understood at long last how detractors of "The Counselor" felt watching that particular film, when actually I'd more so relate "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" to the drunken redundancies of Paolo Sorrentino's outstanding "The Great Beauty". Where that movie's peaks and valleys serve a larger point about life imitating art and vice versa, this one's just feel hopelessly remiss. Or, in other words, as with most things, Arcade Fire did it better. But again, I'm probably in the minority. (52/100)

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

02/06/23

Full Review

Audience Member

I'd be tempted to think the film was all just some pretentious exercise if it wasn't so moving. Resnais (who's 91 by the way) has put together something totally remarkable here, as he combines so many different styles and still manages to make the film thematically consistent.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/13/23

Full Review

Audience Member

http://www.clevelandmovieblog.com/2013/08/you-aint-seen-nothin-yet-august-8th-at.html

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

02/27/23

Full Review

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Alain Resnais

Director

Mathieu Amalric

M. Henri

Michel Piccoli

Le père

Hippolyte Girardot

Dulac

Denis Podalydès

Antoine

Andrzej Seweryn

Marcellin

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Synopsis

A who's-who of French actors are summoned to hear the reading of a playwright's last will and testament. They are asked to view a recording of a play in which all have starred over the years, and as video rolls, they all act out their old roles.

Director: Alain Resnais
Screenwriter: Laurent Herbiet, Alex Reval
Distributor: Kino Lorber
Production Co: Alamode Film, F Comme Film, France 2 Cinéma, Studio Canal, Christmas In July
Genre: Drama
Original Language: French (France)
Release Date (Theaters): Jun 7, 2013, Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Oct 28, 2020
Box Office (Gross USA): $18.5K
Runtime: 1h 55m