Reckoning With a Changing World

MOVIE REVIEWS
One Minute to Midnight (Un peu avant minuit)
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Genre: Drama
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 51m
Director: Nicolas Pariser
Writer: Nicolas Pariser
Cast: Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni, Golshifteh Farahani, Léonie Simaga, Clara Pacini, Micha Lescot, Anaïs Demoustier
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: Léo’s journey through ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT spends much of the time looking backward at his life, although writer/director Nicolas Pariser is far less interested in whether he likes what he finds than in questioning why he assumes his self-examination should matter so much to everyone else. At 49, facing the end of a relationship and learning that the biological father he never knew has died, Léo has every reason to start taking inventory of his life. What sounds like another middle-aged man confronting his regrets becomes a movie about realizing that even your reckoning with yourself can become another form of self-absorption.

Melvil Poupaud plays Léo as someone intelligent enough to recognize that the world around him has changed, but not necessarily equipped to understand what that requires of him. He isn’t some obvious monster awaiting judgment. Léo can be thoughtful, charming, frustrating, defensive, sincere, and painfully unaware within the same conversation. Pariser isn’t interested in giving us a target because the questions become much less useful if everything can be explained by saying the man at the center is simply awful.

A separation from Giulia and the death of a father he never met bring Léo back to Paris before he travels to Italy to handle the inheritance. Instead of turning that visit into a plotted chain of revelations, ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT allows him to move through encounters with his daughter, former partners, friends, and people attached to earlier versions of his life. One person remembers him differently from how he remembers himself; another refuses to indulge the question he wants answered, and gradually the story Léo has constructed about who he has been becomes harder to maintain.

Poupaud is well suited to the tension here. Léo seems accustomed to believing that being able to discuss an issue places him on the correct side of it, and the movie repeatedly tests that assumption. Understanding how power operates in the abstract is considerably easier than recognizing how it may have shaped your own relationships. Poupaud allows flashes of wounded pride and irritation to interrupt Léo’s attempts at careful reflection, making him more believable than he would have been as a perfectly enlightened man patiently accepting every criticism.

The women in his life provide the necessary resistance to letting ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT become an extended exploration of male guilt. Léonie Simaga, Clara Pacini, Anaïs Demoustier, Golshifteh Farahani, and Chiara Mastroianni occupy different places in Léo’s history and present. The film doesn’t reduce them to witnesses called to testify about his character. They refuse the role he’s assigned them. Léo may need to reconsider how he treated women, but that doesn’t mean women have an obligation to guide him through the process.

There’s a version of this story in which every encounter exists to teach Léo something, culminating in a newly improved man. Pariser resists that because change rarely works so efficiently. A person can recognize a mistake and repeat it five minutes later. Someone can believe in equality yet become defensive the moment it requires giving something up.

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT is particularly sharp about how easily self-criticism can become another means of keeping yourself at the center of the discussion. Léo asks whether he behaved respectfully, whether he loved properly, whether his past relationships look different under more recent ideas about gender and power. Those are legitimate questions. The complication arises when his need to investigate them begins to demand emotional labor from people who have their own lives, memories, and problems that don't exist merely to resolve his uncertainty.

The generational divide adds another layer through Emma, his politically active daughter. Léo sees a younger generation living through social and political shifts that he understands but sometimes experiences almost as an observer. That gap isn’t simply about a father being behind the times. The film asks what happens when someone who has spent years thinking of himself as culturally aware discovers that awareness without action may have been a comfortable substitute for participation.

Pariser directs his criticism toward the particular world Léo inhabits. These are people with books, ideas, artistic references, political opinions, and enough intellectual confidence to analyze almost anything. The danger is that analysis becomes its own shelter. Talking about inequality doesn't connect someone to those actually living with its consequences, just as possessing progressive politics doesn’t guarantee progressive behavior inside a relationship.

That emphasis gives the performances room to do more than illustrate positions in an argument. Chiara Mastroianni brings history into Léo’s present through the familiarity between people who have known one another long enough to recognize old habits. Farahani has a different energy, refusing to let his questions determine the terms of their interaction. Demoustier is effective when the film shifts the focus away from what Léo wants to learn and toward the possibility that everybody else has already moved on to concerns he has been too occupied with himself to notice.

Julia Mingo's cinematography favors humanity rather than drawing attention away from it. Paris feels alive around Léo, and movement becomes especially important in a film where so much of the action consists of people speaking. Christel Dewynter's editing has the equally difficult job of determining when a conversation has actually reached its endpoint rather than simply the next pause.

The death of Léo's biological father provides the initial excuse for this inventory of his life. Still, ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT avoids making the absent father the answer to everything wrong with him. There isn't one psychological key waiting to unlock the character. Family history matters, relationships matter, culture matters, generational assumptions matter, and Léo's own choices matter. That refusal to provide a satisfying diagnosis extends to the movie's view of redemption. Léo doesn't need one grand revelation because ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT doesn't pretend that a person reaches 49, hears enough criticism, and suddenly emerges as somebody new. Recognition is smaller and less dramatic than that. Sometimes progress consists of realizing that the conversation doesn't need to end with everyone agreeing that you've finally understood it.

That may also be why the film's best experience has almost nothing to do with guilt. Léo begins by examining whether he’s been a good man to the women in his life. Eventually, the more interesting thought becomes why he expects his crisis to remain so important to them. The women he encounters aren't chapters in his autobiography. Their lives continued whenever he wasn't present, and some of the movie's most effective moments come from the recognition that Léo hasn't been the defining figure in stories he once assumed revolved partly around him.

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT talks around subjects, occasionally overexplains them, returns to questions without resolving them, and refuses to give Léo the transformation that would make everything feel wrapped up. That resistance is also what keeps the film from becoming another story in which a middle-aged man is congratulated for finally understanding the world has changed.

Léo may leave Paris understanding himself a little differently, but understanding isn't presented as an accomplishment worthy of applause. It's merely something he should have been doing all along. ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT allows us to understand the idea that becoming aware that you aren't the center of everyone else's story isn't a tragedy, and it isn't redemption either. It's adulthood arriving later than expected.

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[photo courtesy of BIZIBI, DIMANCHE SOIR]

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