Incendies
Denis Villeneuve's drama about family and war was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language category.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
(R)
***
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“This is the film that should have won an Oscar” in the foreign-language category, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Grounded in the quest of two adult siblings to understand their late mother’s past in a war-torn Middle Eastern country, it captures in epic style “the biblical nature of sectarian violence.” Most of Denis Villeneuve’s “extraordinary” film plays as riveting mystery, said David Edelstein in New York. The mother, played in the movie’s unsettling flashbacks by an indescribably effective Lubna Azabal, left her Canadian-born children two letters—one to be delivered to a father they had presumed dead and the other to a sibling they didn’t know they had. “Ten minutes from the end, there’s a preposterous turn” that reveals Incendies to be a work of mythmaking, but that doesn’t rob its brutal war scenes of their enduring sting. But message matters, said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. This is a film that asks us to forgive Muslim atrocities because Christians can be just as cruel. It’s “an urgent plea to tolerate the intolerant.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Exploring Georgia's southern highlands
The Week Recommends Visit Javakheti, Georgia's 'lake district', and meet the last-remaining 'spirit wrestlers' in the region
-
Delivery drivers face continuing heat danger with Trump's OSHA pick
The Explainer David Keeling is the former head of UPS and also worked at Amazon
-
Is that the buzzing sound of climate change worsening sleep apnea?
Under the radar Catching diseases, not those ever-essential Zzs