‘Homecoming’ Review: Catherine Corsini’s Engrossing Study of a Family Evading a Past That Eventually Divides Them

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic The story template of “Homecoming” is a standard one: Years after an unexplained trauma, a family returns to the place they once called home, where hidden truths come to light and bitter conflicts arise over the course of one seemingly idyllic summer.

Yet for all the secrets and lies that shape the narrative of Catherine Corsini’s straightforwardly told but consistently intriguing new film, its most interesting tensions often emerge from things its characters already know, even if they haven’t acknowledged them out loud.

For Black single parent Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna), arriving at the Corsican birthplace of her children after 15 years away, disinterring a buried past throws her maternal insecurities into sharp relief; for her teenage daughters Jessica (Suzy Bemba) and Farah (Esther Gohourou), what revelations the trip yields only underline their respective senses of not-belonging in their own small family.

This is complex, delicate material, simmering with subtext that occasionally boils over into vocal anguish regarding the prejudice and condescension faced on a daily basis by Black women in French society — and it’s handled, on screen at least, with tact and compassion by Corsini, a director at her best when her social interests coincide with a knack for robust, old-fashioned melodrama.