Time Regained (1999) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Kirk Johnson ★★★★½

  You know how people say (inaccurately) that human beings only use 10% of their brains? Watching Ruiz makes me feel like most other directors only use 10% of cinema.

• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★

  It's cinematography makes everything look like a dream. The performances are good... But none of that matters when you can't connect (or even care) about the story, which was my case.

• Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★½

  3rd Raúl Ruiz (after Three Lives and Only One Death and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting)

  It is easy to admire Ruiz's Time Regained as a piece of filmmaking. Translating Proust's iconic Roman-Fleuve to the screen is a virtually impossible task, thanks to his famously complex sentence structure and extremely interior narratives. But Ruiz gets as close as possible to the perfect version of this with his extremely natural feeling use of flashbacks; images float into one another like ribbons of a stream, only for us to be jolted back to the present as easily as we slipped into the past. It's a strange sensation, like being jolted from a dream, but it feels appropriate for the reverie-based ramblings…

• Review by maneleeo ★★★★

  I believe Tarkovsky's "Mirror" is the best depiction of memory to ever grace cinema. However, Raúl Ruiz adaptation of Marcel Proust's work is nothing shy of a brilliant showcase of the fallibility of memory, and how we misrepresent the past in our minds.

  As soon as the film started, I thought I was seeing things, as objects were slowly and inexplicably moving and going from one place to another. It almost felt like I was experiencing a bad fever. Ruiz was not afraid of exploring the surreal nature of memory. People could change who they were, sometimes we think someone was during an event of our lives, only to discover they were never really there at all.

  I was really tempted to discover the original work that made this adaptation to the screen possible, but discovering it was seven volumes long daunted me. Maybe it's a project of the future.

• Review by Oliver Swift ★★★

  One of those movies that is better if you sit and watch it whilst reading the Wikipedia synopsis alongside

• Review by Carlos Valladares ★★★★½

  Me rn: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpcYAvvYLFI

  My life, I suspect, begins in earnest here. My first feature Raúl Ruiz: a man after my own heart. As is the asthmatic Marky P too, bien sure.

  O the FLOW of this Chilean!!! Time, play, love: he gets it.

  "in this work is all your life and the lives of all. To review it in its entirety would take an eternity."

• Review by C_elegans ★★

  Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit habe ich nie gelesen und dieser Film deckte schonungslos meine Unwissenheit auf. Cinematographisch opulent und großartig besetzt, können die Längen zwar ansprechend überbrückt werden, dennoch fühlte ich mich in einem fiktionalen Werk bisher nur bei der Lektüre von Joyce's Ulysses ähnlich hoffnungslos verloren, wie hier.

• Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½

  Within the clouded and occluded, very Proustian, narrative of the film there lurks a poetics of memory that almost recreates 'stream of consciousness' in cinematic terms; the adult Proust follows the child Marcel through a hall of mirrors stuffed with classical statuary onto a seashore where a haut-monde party is taking place. He bribes a waiater to investigate a young lady for him and collect as much detail as possible about the embroidery on the cuffs of her sleeves, and then the narrator recounts a parable about the duration of human life, the continuity of human imagination across milennia of artistic creation, and the length of time necessary for coming to understand one or the other of those in the…

• Review by Arash ★★★★½

  It would take an eternity to review one's life.

• Review by Jude ★★★½

  almost certainly one of the most complex deployments of Ruiz’s style, characterized by a restlessness and constant reflexive (yet propulsive) forward motion that rivals Proust’s own extraordinarily sensuous prose, and a film that is often tremendously moving, which is why I wish I liked it more than I did. unfortunately, as irresistible as this often was on a moment-to-moment level, structurally it’s shapeless and underdetermined, not to mention overlong but still incapable of rendering the obsessions which animated Proust’s work with the necessary care and all-consuming force they deserve, except in the case of its ruminations on morality, which are rendered, if anything, more potent here by the inherently temporal nature of the medium. disappointing in the context of Ruiz’s filmography but would still be a culminating achievement for most other filmmakers so maybe i’m rating this too harshly

• Review by Adam Cook ★★★★

  The day the sculptor Salvini died, he was given, as all mortals are, the time to review every place and moment of his life. The sculptor refused. “My life has been a series of extraordinary adventures. To revisit them would only make me sadder. I’d rather use my remaining time to review my last work, “Divine Nemesis” otherwise known as the triumph of death.

  So it was.

  Soon after, the angel of death returned, to announce the end of his time of grace. “What a paradox” he exclaimed “you gave me enough time to revisit my entire life which lasted 63 years. The same length of time was too short to review an object I made in 3 months”.

  “In this work is all your life and the life of all men” the angel replied “to review it would take an eternity”

• Review by Film at Lincoln Center

  Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation—an attempt to condense all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time into a single feature, using the seven-part novel’s last installment as a kind of frame—is also one of his lushest, most transporting reflections on the movies’ power to seize and preserve moments of time. Proust’s narrator, Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella), is a consistent presence in the movie, but Time Regained is dominated by entrancing, sometimes tragic figures that seem to drift in and out of the film’s field of view: Catherine Deneuve as the stately former courtesan Odette de Crecy; Emmanuelle Béart as Marcel’s young love Gilberte; John Malkovich as the closeted, mysterious Baron de Charlus. Ruiz gives special attention to Proust’s fascination with photography and early forms of radio and cinema—technologies that promised a more perfect form of “time regained” than words or memories could provide.

  A week-long run of a new restoration starts on February 9.