Review: '1,000 Times Good Night' Starring Juliette Binoche Is Beautiful But Formless

This is a reprint of our review from the 2013 Marrakech Film Festival.

How much does autobiography help or hinder a film's effectiveness? Norwegian director Erik Poppe's first English-language film, which played at the Marrakech Film Festival as part of the tribute evening honoring its star, Juliette Binoche, is avowedly based on incidents, and professional and personal quandaries the director himself experienced with one crucial change: Poppe switched the lead roles around so that it is Binoche who is his proxy, and Kingslayer Nikolaj Coster-Waldau playes the character based on Poppe's wife. That change is crucial to the final film, and as it wears on, begins to look like maybe the best narrative decision that could have been made. Not only does it give Binoche the central role, which she carries with her typical flinty accomplishment, but in making the war photographer who is torn between vocational passion and home life into a woman, new layers are added to what might otherwise...