Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Michael Neumann The best thing about this French New Wave throwback certainly isn't the narrative-impaired non-story, in which an aging criminal in debt (Michel Piccoli) enlists the young son of a dead colleague for a daring robbery of a pharmaceutical company. The combination of familiar pulp fiction outline with stylishly indulgent camera technique recalls the early work of Truffaut and Godard, and in true nouvelle-vague tradition writer director Leos Carax eventually dismisses his plot altogether to concentrate, at length and to little purpose, on the visual mood of his film. Along the way a bittersweet romance is (almost) allowed to develop between Piccoli's young mistress (Juliete Binoche) and hired thief Denis Lavant, whose angular punk features and physique (he was trained as an acrobat and mime) provide a fascinating contrast to his co-star's cool, reflective calm. The attention Carax lavishes on Binoche, who isn't required to do much more than simply look demure, may seem to border on infatuation, but some latitude should be allowed for the relative youth of the 26 year old auteur.

vostf On the whole this is typical artsy-fartsy film-making. Interesting visual ideas are clustered with mucho highbrow babbling so that you can brand it something like "post-modern cinema" to look cleverer than you are.Actually a bunch of visual ideas are much more interesting than the rest so it's not only the dialogue which spoils the art house soup. And that's why I won't hesitate in calling this pretentious auteur stuff: most images are just plain self-conscious (cleverly framed for art's sake - call it experimental cinema if you like, I say it's simply annoying), pseudo-poetical situations and lines (pure Godard-style) and a big inscrutable vacuum all over the place (plot construction is too vulgar a thing for artists to spoil their hands with it).Next time I'll try Ed Wood's Plan 9 from outer space. At least I won't laugh to forget how much I'm bored.

writers_reign Seems I'm in the minority here but I'll take it on the chin and won't open a vein just yet. Carax clearly has his admirers and we can only guess at the reasons. Mabe youthful rebellion against a mainstream way of telling a story; maybe disciples of the 'new'different-is- automatically-BETTER school. Who knows. I guess it's fair to say that I Endured this movie rather than Enjoyed it. Depending on your point of view Carax has an endearing and/or irritating habit of fading in the middle of a scene and then coming back to the same point. Why? You tell me. In its favor it does feature two of the now loveliest (in 1986 they were merely pretty) French actresses in Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche plus two all-time great actors in Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani (albeit only a cameo for the latter) but against this it throws in one of those leading men who seem to get cast inexplicably given they lack virtually every criteria for leading men, I'm thinking of the two Vincents, Cassell and Gallo, Benoit Magimal et al. In this case it's Denis Lavant (a favorite of Carax) who resembles nothing so much as a sullen Russ Tamblyn and is one anchovy short of a pizza given that he starts out by dumping Julie Delpy, who is herself one egg short of an omelette by being head-over-heels in love with this yob in the first place. Plot? You don't want to know, believe me.

drumerdrul He is a genius with images He is entwined and tormented He is Leos Carax, a true comicstrip kind of cinematographer He is great in all his movies, but this one is the best My all time favorite