"In the play you all know, Maloya Snake, he gave me everything I need to build a career on, my career."

Olivier Assayas and Juliette Binoche reunite after their previous collaboration (Summer Hours) in this wonderful meta film that has some slight similarities to Birdman. This could be the female version of that movie although not as entertaining and without all the technical achievements. It is also a little more subtle in its approach. The story begins on a train as re-known actress, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is heading to Zurich with her personal assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart) to receive an award on behalf of a dear friend, Wilhelm Melchior, who is the reason why she is now a famous actress. Twenty years ago, he offered her the role to play the lead character in the stage and later on in the film adaptation of that play. On their way to Zurich they receive the terrible news of his passing which deeply saddens her. After the ceremony Valentine arranged a meeting with Klaus (Lars Eidinger) who wants Maria to play the older character in his adaptation of Wilhelm's novel. She continues to identify with the strong younger character and doesn't feel its correct for her to play the weaker role of Helen, but ultimately she agrees to do it. The lead character will be played by the promising young actress Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz) who has had her share of scandals with paparazzi's recently. In order to prepare for the role, Maria and Valentine travel to Wilhelm's former home in Sils Maria surrounded by the gorgeous Alps. Here, Maria is forced to reflect on her career and come to terms with the fact that she's an aging actress.

Clouds of Sils Maria is another film that reminds us that life imitates art because we are always finding ways to express ourselves and the means to do so is through art. Maria is forced to come to terms with her reality through the acceptance of this character she's not thrilled about playing because she doesn't seem to understand her. There are several scenes in which she is rehearsing the lines with Valentine that kind of blur the line between fantasy and reality. There were moments in which i didn't know if they were actually arguing or if they were simply reading the lines of the play. Those scenes were memorable and unique and I believe are at the center of this film. There are also some great conversations between the two about art and blockbuster Hollywood movies portraying the opposing two point of views. The film is rich with strong female characters exploring art and life in a rather authentic way. Clouds of Sils Maria may not be for everyone because it is slow paced and some scenes can become tedious if you aren't a patient viewer, but I found it a rewarding experience and a solid exploration of the passage of time and coming to terms with it. The classical music score (Pachelbel's Canon in D Major) also gives the film a touch of class. The scenery is also beautiful and it makes each conversation all the more profound.

Juliette Binoche has always been a wonderful actress so it comes as no surprise that she deliver yet another solid and touching performance. The real question everyone had was whether or not Kristen Stewart could hold her own next to this talented actress. The two share a lot of screen time together and at no point did I feel that Binoche was eating up the screen. Stewart gives in my opinion the best performance of her career (and I did really like her in Camp X-Ray and Still Alice) and she truly shines here. She won the Cesar (France's version of the Oscars) for best supporting screenplay and she proves that with the right material she can deliver solid roles. Chloe Grace Moretz also delivers a strong performance despite not having much screen time. She's hilarious in the scenes where Maria looks up her name on the internet and we get clips of the scandals she's been involved in. All in all, this is a solid film exploring some interesting subjects with solid performances and a beautiful landscape.

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Greetings again from the darkness. Most of us don't spend much time re-living our past, and we certainly don't go through the emotional turmoil of analyzing our early lives from a different perspective. This story puts actress Maria (Juliette Binoche) in those shoes and then we watch as she fights, claws and battles her way through.

Maria is a well-respected veteran actress who has been offered a role in the revival of the play that made her a star more than 20 years earlier. The play was written by her mentor, who dies suddenly as she is on her way to visit. Hotshot director Klaus (Lars Eidinger) wants Maria for the role of the older woman, and this is difficult for Maria to accept since she played what she considers the far more interesting younger woman in the first version. Internal psychological warfare breaks out.

Maria's personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) struggles to keep Maria informed of today's world – celebrity gossip is especially key in their conversations. They also run lines together, and the parallels between the play and their real lives are so prevalent that the lines are often blurred between written word and spoken word. Things get really dicey when Jo-Ann (Chloe Grace Moretz) enters the picture as the talented, extremely popular, personally out of control actress slated to play opposite Maria in the play.

These three actresses are exceptional … yes, even you Kristen Stewart haters will be impressed. They each bring extraordinary depth to their role, and all are a bit outside of what would be considered their comfort zone. Their exchanges are fun, but what's not said is every bit as exciting and key.

Filmed in the Sils Maria area of the Alps, the landscape is beyond breathtaking. Maloja Snake is the title of the play, and it refers to the fantastic cloud formations that snake through the peaks and valleys of this marvel of nature. The scenery is a nice complement to the emotional rides each of the characters take, and writer/director Olivier Assayas ensures that we have no shortage of talking points after the film.

I was very glad that i attended the opening ceremony of the Beirut International Film Festival with the presence of Juliette Binoche screening this touching movie! We're talking here about a festival movie so if you're not ready for a lot of talking scenes, well this is not for you! The story itself is brought by Binoche to director Olivier Assayas about an actress at the peak of her career who is asked again to play a role in a play that made her famous years ago! Let's be clear: this movie is all about stunning performances by a great Trio of actresses Binoche, Stewart and Moretz! Everyone was so great performing the characters. Binoche made it clear that this movie talk about her career and how can it be disturbed or touched emotionally on every level when she'll reach a certain age and when new generations of actors will rise! A must see for cinema lovers and especially for professional actors!

We witnessed the kinetic energy of the Oscar-winning Birdman about an aging actor making a comeback on the Broadway stage. Now with the expert and engaging Clouds of Sils Maria we witness a middle-aged actress, Maria (Juliette Binoche), contend with both her 20-year return to the same play but as the older character and the energy of a personal assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), that reminds Maria of time's passage and the changes in her profession.

Writer/director Olivier Assayas delights us with stunning camera work in an early sequence on the train;Hitchcock would love the camera and editing if you remember Strangers on a Train. Assayas also features the Alps with such loving cinematography you'll be booking a trip. Credit Yorick Le Saux for the editing and Marion Monnier for cinematography.

The heart of an excellent drama such as this is its words, the best way to convey the complex emotions each actress must display. Besides Binoche's up-close glamour, Kristin Stewart's sassy, dark beauty is there to remind us that youth rules.

The screenplay offers advice about the changing nature of dynamic dialogue: "The text is like an object. It's gonna change perspective based on where you're standing." (Valentine). In the case of Maria and Valentine, the sometimes screwball-comedy-like repartee reveals layers of perception and emotion heightened by the fact that we are witnessing the deconstruction of the acting experience: Maria holds to classical interpretation while Valentine's thesis is that spontaneity and electricity are the key components.

The plot of Maria's accepting a stage role for a play she acted in 20 years ago as the young lead loosely parallels the scenario of this film (young assistant provoking the older actress) until a climactic moment on the mountain, a moment whose ambiguity will demand you complete the scene for yourself. Regardless, you will know you have seen one of the best films of the year depicting the rigorous working of the art of acting given by two of the best actresses today in film (Stewart won a Cesar for this role, Binoche won an Oscar for English Patient, and a mature Chloe Grace Moretz is sure to be Oscar nominated soon!).

Former film critic Olivier Assayas is probably one of those few people who inspire me on a creative level. Not that strange if you consider one of Assayas' own influences: anarchist and situationist Guy Debord. French intellectuals in the 1960s were, in my opinion, too often needlessly complex theoretically and parlor socialists or would-be revolutionaries politically. In contrast, Debord's refreshing anarchist views were typical for the radicality of the 1968-generation and were more about individual freedom, artistic aspirations and fighting against a new form of determinism: consumption. In that respect, Assayas' Après mai was one of the best films I've seen in years. In Clouds of Sils Maria he puts on his meta-shoes and tells the story about an older actress who'll perform in the same play she did when she was young: Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders who plays Helena. In the meanwhile Valentine (a brilliant Kristen Stewart, who would've expected?!), the personal assistant of Maria, resembles a version of Maria when she was young. Joanne Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), an up-and-coming actress with the reputation of a troublemaker, is Maria's co-star in the theater play. But when the play (about a young girl (Sigrid) who seduces an older woman (Helena)) starts to reflect reality (especially because Maria used to play Sigrid herself), the film begins to get an extra - metaphorical - layer. In the end we are confronted with thoughts about time, change, fame, getting older and conflict between generations. Clouds of Sils Maria is a beautiful film with some very good acting, especially by Stewart. It also raises interesting questions about contemporary stardom and transience. Nevertheless, this movie is (feels?) less personal than Assayas' previous one and therefor misses a bit of the uppercut I was hoping for.

As beautiful as this movie is to look at, I found it a little over- complicated with too many confusing sub-plots, several of which are aborted. Early on, it looks like the presence of an old flame on-set is going to be a major issue for Binoche, but that melts away. It looks like her relationship with the young actress playing the lead is going to be an issue, but that only leads to one minor spat near the end. Her PA rehearses scenes with her in a way that implies some sort of Sapphic love, but this evaporates too (except perhaps in the mysterious nauseous episode). Plenty to mull over. But fabulous scenery, esp. the breathtaking 'Snake' of cloud, and great performances from both Binoche (more animated than ever before) and Stewart.

If you are a big fan of Magritte and Escher, of the writer Sebald, of Pirandello and Philip Glass and maybe the film "Koyaanisqatsi", I predict that you will love this film. If, on the other hand, you can't see the point of any of these and believe only in Aristotle's six elements of drama, there are many other excellent films you will like much better. It's a matter of taste.

In this film, writer/director Assayas deliberately blurs the distinctions between a number of levels. You start with people in the business of theatre and film: Marie Enders (Binoche), an experienced and celebrated actress, and Valentine (Stewart), her young, busy, competent personal assistant, and the people in Marie's past, living and dead.

Then there is the level of the characters in the play "The Maloja Snake" of twenty years ago, when Marie played the young and cruel Sigrid who loved and crushed her middle-aged employer, Helena. There is the level of the characters of the same play today, in which director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger) hopes to recruit Marie to play Helena, possibly with a different take on the characters' motives and psychology, and in which Jo-Ann Ellis (Moritz) is eventually cast as Sigrid.

And there is also the level of the real human world, including events in the life of the real Kristen Stewart, which have striking parallels in the life of the fictional Ellis; the same seems to be true of Binoche and Enders, and I have read that "The Maloja Snake" is a parallel world version of Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant".

Spanning all these levels are the the real Switzerland and its real mountains and clouds, including the real Maloja Snake, a cloud phenomenon which was the subject of a black-and-white short film in the 1920's which is excerpted in Assayas' film and which can be seen on YouTube. The Internet spans all these levels too, and all the characters in the film are busy with texting and Skyping and Googling and checking out and fixing their IMDb info.

And then the work of playing characters, of determining and managing emotions, of arguing about what really motivates real or fictional or play-within-a-play fictional characters, either within the industry of the creative arts or not, also bridges the levels. We are constantly aware of the analogies and reflections among Valentine - Maria, Sigrid - Helena, Jo-Ann - Maria, and so on. Readings of lines take place, in which you sometimes wonder what level you are on, and we see a lot of the details of the creative discussions which must go into the production of plays or for that matter, not incidentally, movies such as "Clouds of Sils Maria". If you get lazy and suspend your disbelief and allow yourself to mentally presume that "Clouds" is a comprehensible narrative of the real world, Assayas will bring you up short without any ceremony.

So, does that kind of thing strike you as artistically intriguing or intellectually exciting? If it does, see the movie. It will give you a lot to think about and appreciate and puzzle about and discuss afterward. (The Swiss tourist board will thank you also.) If it seems a bit dry and abstract, well, you are fairly warned.

Juliette Binoche stars as a middle-aged actress who agrees to star again in the play that made her famous at 18 - this time playing the older woman in a lesbian relationship. In the play, the older woman is seduced and abandoned by the younger woman (to be played by Chloe Moretz, a bratty Hollywood star, in the upcoming play), and commits suicide because of it. With her career fading and the abyss ahead, Binoche is understandably nervous that the role reflects her own life too much. The bulk of the film is actually the relationship between Binoche and her assistant (Kristen Stewart), who walks the line between being her employee and her best friend. Stewart is kind of tasked with challenging Binoche, but, as a famous actress and as her employer, neither of them is sure Binoche really wants to or should be challenged. The film is certainly rich and interesting, but it's also a bit lethargic and maybe a bit too vague as well. It could really have stood to be more focused, because there's a lot of little plot points around the corner that distract from the main themes. Binoche is good, as always, though I wouldn't put this up there with her best work. Stewart has received the bulk of the praise. Indeed, she is good, but I think the vast praise she has received is more a case of "Wow the chick from Twilight really can act!" If you saw Adventureland, you know she's not really a bad actress. This is probably her best role, but it's nothing award-worthy.

Rehearsing for a revival of the play that made her famous proves unexpectedly challenging for an esteemed actress in this French drama starring Juliette Binoche. While she knows all the dialogue, the difficulty is being asked to the play the older of the two protagonists (a la Michael Caine assuming the Laurence Olivier role in the remake of 'Sleuth'). Further tensions arise as the older protagonist is manipulated by the younger one in the play with Binoche wondering how close she may be to the older character. Fascinating as all this might sound, the film is nevertheless hard to get through at times with the plot not really taking off until 40 minutes in when Binoche views online clips of her bratty co-star to-be and tries to rehearse knowing what her co-star is like. At its best, the film blurs reality as Binoche and her personal assistant practise with it often ambiguous whether the pair are really fighting or simply rehearsing. There are also some memorable bits as the pair discuss whether science fiction dramas can have merit and the notion that "thinking about a text is different to living it", but these sparks unfortunately fizzle out before the film is over. As others have observed, the movie has a curious meta quality with Binoche playing an actress character very similar to herself, but the protracted first forty and final fifteen minutes oddly leads the film succeeding best in its middle section.

The movie didn't present a story that's easy to relate to for most viewers. I think even for movie enthusiasts the core story doesn't really click into their minds. It also doesn't get presented well enough at the opening stages. The movie builds the characters well enough at the early stages then starts to present the core story and letting the main conflict seeps in into the whole bigger picture. Thus this movie feels so very slow that it kind of bored me to the first hour or so. But the acting work is very much a splendid job in overall. The three main cast did their parts very greatly immersing in their own respective characters and depicting the right emotions and mannerisms. Julieete Binoche being with the most screen time here did great in exploring her character and her character's anxieties. Kristen Stewart did also very well to develop herself past Twilight movies. She adequately balances Binoche in their dialog parts. Chloe Grace Moretz did a great job in depicting the rebellious star, and she did great to portray a huge difference between the hangover press conference scene and the crucial hiding from paparazzi scene.

07-16-2015 -- I'm generally willing to watch Juliette Binoche in just about anything. (She was brilliant in "Trois couleurs: Bleu" as well as "The English Patient.")

But this, despite being a film, is a very wordy play ... and then a play within that play ... and possibly another play within that play ... it got to the point where this was clearly an actors' exercise, for the benefit of actors, the audience be damned.

It's a lot to ask of film audiences to simply bear witness to angsting actors and actresses, playing roles within roles.

The settings and backdrops are dramatic and enticing. But the story continually falls back to the inner angst of an aging actress along with that of her personal assistant -- both her "real" personal assistant and the one in the play within the play.

The enigmatic title refers to both a climatic phenomenon called the "Maloja snake", which occurs in the Engadinean alpine pass in Switzerland, and to a village at one end of a local lake. The village is the home of an elderly playwright who much earlier wrote a work called "The Maloja Snake" about the complicated relationship between a young woman in her late teens (Sigrid) and her middle-aged female employer (Helena). The film is all about the re staging of this play in which actress Maria who originally took the younger role to great acclaim has now been invited to portray the older woman in the new interpretation.

It is unusual, but a pleasing change, for a film to have all its leading roles taken by women. Superb French actress Juliette Binoche, whom I have admired since her early English-language work ("Damage" and "The English Patient"), is Maria, struggling to come to terms with her different role in the play. American actress Kristen Stewart is excellent in the secondary role as Maria's personal assistant Valentine and so different from her "Twilight" movies. The third role is taken by another young American, Chloë Grace Moretz, who is the actress taking over as Sigrid in the play - again a very different persona from the one we have seen before in the "Kick-Ass" movies.

This is a wordy work but the words matter. At times, we are not sure if the interaction between the two main personages is between Helena and Sigrid or between Maria and Valentine and even between Binoche and Stewart. In truth, there are elements of all three which is how subtle and nuanced is this German-French-Swiss co-production written and directed by the French Olivier Assayas. Ultimately this is a film, like near contemporary "Birdman", about acting but, however much the American Academy may have feted "Birdman", I found "Clouds Of Sils Maria" much more intelligible and engaging.

I really had high hopes for this film. The film was cliché and a bit slow. Though on the positive notes, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stweart were quite brilliant in the film. The relationship between them felt so real that when they began to laugh at things involving their current circumstances I literally laughed out to loud with them. I was more blown away by Kristen Stweart. She was incredible in this film. I don't know too much of her filmography other than she was part the Twilight Saga...which is a bit corny in my taste but these are the type of films she is made for. Juliette Binoche was incredible too but that is a given. As for Chloe Grace, her acting was a bit more on the amateur level. I feel with Chloe its always a hit or miss with the roles she plays in her films. Overall it was an O.K. movie.

A film that tries too hard.

'Clouds of Sils Maria' is one of those productions that attempts to be artsy and impactful, by making everything look and feel great. By doing so, it almost forgets to join it all together in order to solidify the plot.

I don't hate this by any means, it simply does too much. There's numerous narratives here which just end, without clearer explanation. That does, I guess, leave it to the viewer to interpret on their own, which is good though not when it's every important path in the film.

Juliette Binoche is excellent as Maria, her performance definitely carries things and she improves all those around her. Kristen Stewart is the 'best of the rest', but she always (to me, anyway) feels out of place in this world.

It shows off some stunning shots of the Swiss municipality, has a great lead but ultimately fails to strike a chord with me unfortunately.

Ambiguity is the key world of this film. You are the major actor in the sense that your interpretation makes the film. Each scene is so ambiguous that you can always interpret it in various manners so in the end _you_ are the director. When Maria and Val work on the text, rehearse the play, the feelings are so mingled that you are the one who decide if they are those of Helena- Sigrid or rather Maria-Val. Reality is entangled. I loved the Alps hiking shots and overall the mysterious Maloja snake. I would have rated it a 9 to the Writer-Director Olivier Assayas but reduced it to a 8 because I was disappointed in Juliette Binoche's performance. She is usually better than in this film, it is as if she didn't feel like acting this character, a bit like what happens in the film itself. At several occasions her laugh is artificial and fake. She is obviously ill at ease in this character, which proves what I wrote before about entangled reality between the film itself and the play prepared in the film. I'm not sure I am very clear but those who have seen and felt/perceived the movie as I, will understand.

Character study of older actress (a wonderful Juliette Binoche) who is playing the "older woman" role in a theatrical production. The production made her famous many years before, playing the younger woman. Her relationship with her young personal assistant (a somewhat monotone yet oddly compelling Kristin Stewart) seems to be the central part of the film, for awhile anyway. The "snake" clouds in the alpine Swiss village where they are staying provide a dramatic setting.

Stay for the dialogue, get frustrated by so many unresolved plotlines.

I saw Olivier Assayas' CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA twice in order to fully absorb the breadth of this complicated, though seemingly simple, story of a forty something actress Maria Enders (a radiant Juliette Binoche) who is asked to be in a revival of a theatrical production titled Majola Snake that made her famous twenty years earlier when she played the ingenue Sigrid, filled with the confidence and callousness of youth who seduces her boss Helena, an older woman; their subsequent love "affair" incinerates the very ground that Helena stands on propelling her to suicide. The twist here is that a new director is asking Enders, a now celebrated actress to perform the part of the mature woman devastated by desire. Generational differences extrude into every aspect of Maria's world - physical and psychological boundaries become blurred and the fictional script blends into reality, past memories and present relationships. This is a film about film as well as life. Does a great actor lose oneself utterly in a part? What happens when you take on another persona and grope to come up for air to retrieve the you that you once were?

We sense the power of Sils Maria a hauntingly exquisite municipality in the Swiss Alps, where the actress and her young assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart who masterfully holds her own in every scene with Binoche) go to rehearse to prepare for the upcoming play in a house cradled in the snowy valleys of the majestic mountains which belonged to Maria's beloved mentor, the playwright William Melchoir, who dies unexpectedly at the beginning of the film, literally setting the stage for the ensuing drama. Against this breathtaking backdrop the individual is subsumed by the beauty of the surroundings; the upcoming stage production, Majola Snake, refers to the clouds which slowly wind through the valleys blanketing the view with a blindingly beautiful soft white mist - foreshadowing the fog and confusion of the two women who are wrestling with a dialogue which gets unhinged from the pages of the script and infiltrates their precarious realities.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart's interactions both fuse and clash as their role-playing illuminates each one's frailties and strengths. From the onset of the movie we see what an efficient and capable personal assistant the lanky, beautiful, two-cellphones-in hand Valentine is, always making sure that Maria Ender's busy professional activity runs smoothly. Once they start reading scenes together, the delicate hierarchy begins to transform, and the gap between their years becomes a source of differing tastes and outlooks. There is an undercurrent of sexual tension which is verbally unacknowledged, but at the same time obviously acknowledged visually; Juliette Binoche, her hair now closely cropped, dresses more severely - the wardrobe revealing her amalgamation into Helena and the disorientation and turbulence of her own yearnings.

On the Internet, we catch our first glimpse of the "scandalous" 18 year old, Jo Ann (a blooming Chloe Grace Moretz,) - the stereotypical Lindsay Lohan-type actress who will play Sigrid, her videoed exploits being Googled by Maria Enders. The Bette Davis classic All About Eve comes to mind, but this upstart is a contemporary version, self assured and fearless - with a belief in youth's immortality trumping those whose futures are shortened by the labyrinth of passing time.

The men in this movie are ancillary - a writer, a director, a former lover - all functioning as vehicles in divulging snippets of the plot's history, but all subordinate to the women who are portrayed with an intimacy unveiled through the emotional archaeology of attachment, passion, and the apprehensive challenge of ambiguous entanglements.

Very natural acting. I truly expected no surprises out of this movie so I was taken aback by it a bit. Beautifully shot film. Interesting to see inside the machine of an actor's life vs. a actor's/celebrity's life.

Yes, I do like Pirandello, Escher, Magritte, Philip Glass.... but surely not this pretentious nonsense movie. It is a very well shot and acted one, and Switzerland looks very nice, sometimes the movie seems to be almost a touristic advert to the natural beauties of that region. The main problem is the intellectually wanna-be-smart story, filled with weak parallels between fiction and reality, emotions shown and hidden, reality and game. Not only this kind of theme has been already told in great movies and works of art, but this time the whole thing appears to be leading nowhere and meaning nothing, making it another quite boring, very long, pretentious self indulging French movie (they seem to be very good at it). Ah, and the unnecessary nudity is Art obviously, how could I not get it? Avoid it.