Summer Hours

Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours (2008) began as a commission for a project at the Musée d'Orsay and grew into one of the loveliest, most understated films of its decade, a favourite of critics around the world. A gentle film about art, family and the passage of time, it is among the warmest works in the director's varied career.

Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier play the siblings dividing their late mother's estate, including the Orsay-worthy objects that have always furnished their childhood home. Assayas treats the possible fates of these heirlooms (a museum vitrine, the auction house, or simply getting lost) as an elegy for a vanishing French bourgeois culture, and for the way meaning drains out of objects once they are taken from the lives that gave them value. The summer light and the house itself carry as much of the film as any of the actors.

Critics praised its grace, its lightness of touch and its emotional depth, and it topped several best-of-year polls. Out of a story about inheritance and property, Summer Hours makes a reflection on memory and globalisation, and on what any of us passes on. It is Assayas at his most humane: a small film that holds a whole world of feeling, with real depth under its lightness. Among critics it has become one of the best-loved films of its decade.