Struggling publishing editor Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric) splits up his long-time girlfriend Jenny (a delightfully loopy Jeanne Balibar) and hesitantly takes up with the highly-sexed anne (Virginie Ledoyen). Gabriel’s friend Adrien (Francois Cluzet) is a talented but insecure writer who’s having an affair with a 15-year-old girl. The reappearance of an old illness forces Adrien to come to terms with his mortality and acts as a catalyst in the changing relationship between his friends. Late August, Early September is composed of a series of seemingly isolated sequences, each of which provides a different perspective on the characters and their relationships. The film itself succeeds in capturing a strong sense of lives being lived and characters being transformed by the exigencies of human existence. Assayas’s most mature and affecting work to date, this marvellous movie has attractive performances from a large ensemble cast and a fluid camera style that makes the hyper-realism of much recent French cinema look more naive than life-like.