Here is a rough translation provided by @500daysofRK. She's a Doll!! Here is the link to the french review if you want to read it there in french. Click here for original review!
"Already a feature film director quite confidential in 1999, Guns 1748, and numerous music videos for Radiohead, U2, REM or Cypress Hill, this is a filmmaker who takes his time to assert himself and make a name in cinema like his father or his uncle. Things could be accelerated with Jake Scott's 'Welcome to the Rileys', selected at Sundance and Deauville this year, which proves to be a nice little surprise. Artist of the image, is Jake Scott s great director of actors, surrounded by a cast that alternates sure values and revelations. Indeed if the bare minimum expected overlooked James Gandolfini is the usual excellence, we did not expect much of Kristen Stewart, in [the] excellent 'Into the Wild' or 'Runaways', but too dull in the Twilight trilogy. And she proves it here with some talent - even if it's hard to let go of her angry teenager look - she [can] easily negotiate the rest of her career once the Vampire Saga has ended and been forgotten. 'Welcome to the Rileys' doesn't revolutionize the U.S. independent film but the film offers a sensitive drama, realistic, rather clearly seen even if not necessarily marked [on] the papers.
'Welcome to the Rileys' is built on a relatively conventional screenplay idea, namely an outsider is difficult to control the behavior that will allow a couple to the total drift to find, harder than before. One quickly understands that it is a question impossible mourning the loss of a child, the kind of event that disrupts a life and can make life hell for a couple. The loss of the fruit of love, is there something worse? Hard to say but this is the main theme developed in Welcome to the Rileys. This is the story of a couple at the bottom of the hole, really, and who has no real solution to redress the balance. Depression, adultery, lies, these are the outlets of the Riley family. Illusory suns rays, so much so that the only way out is escape. A final unexpected tragedy, cruel, precipitated matters further: Doug Riley has to go, away from his wife, away from the memory of his deceased daughter too soon. And it's an unlikely meeting which will give him a taste for life, a pattern of redemption seen and reviewed, efficient but starved of originality.
If subsequently it seems to already know her, he does it will take the game by the sobriety of the assembly. The emotion is never too far, it is also often absent. But yet the time to a few scenes prior Commons, Jake Scott succeeds, thanks to its excellent actors, give rise to a totally natural and therefore extremely powerful. A moment of isolation in a garage illuminated by the light of a lighter and a cigarette, a meeting in a strip club, especially a sequence of open urban tumult reunion so fraught with meaning and hope that She takes us to the guts. But later, Welcome to the Riley's plunges into something quite flat, not necessarily bad, but no real relief. You're never surprised, and this is not the conclusion ultra agreed that will change the situation. That said the film is worn by its performers, incredible throughout.
Jake Scott, broken enough for his eccentricities visual clips, packs all fairly conventional, if not impersonal. Sobriety is required and it is ultimately the right choice. Sometimes the director allows himself some pretty cool effects, the time sequence of a small plane or not disgusting in some really stylish night sequences, but overall nothing differentiates 'Welcome to the Rileys' another production calibrated for Sundance . What sets it apart from others is his casting well. Melissa Leo in Frozen River already incredible, delivers a performance blatant realism. James Gandolfini is just perfect for this role, the former Tony Soprano is capable of carrying a film on his own shoulders and his eyes, he impresses sustainably. And the surprise is, well, Kristen Stewart as a young adult prostitute who finally breaks her romantic image [of silly]. Good choice."
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