Cannes. Selon Charlie.

The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett on Nicole Garcia's "complex and rewarding story," Selon Charlie (Charlie Says): "Set in a breezy unnamed Atlantic French town, the film takes a while to get going but turns into a penetrating examination of the way people's lives can veer off track and how hard it can be to find the way back."

Updated through 5/28.

Mike D'Angelo at Nerve: "Crisply directed and generally well acted, with standout moments here and there, but none of the individual anecdotes is especially novel or memorable, and the intended gestalt never really emerges."

Variety's Lisa Nesselson: "While it's perfectly fine to make audiences work for their rewards, there's a vast gap between spoon-feeding and being willfully oblique, with scripters opting too often for the latter. Pic will have its fans, especially in Gaul, but a riddle wrapped inside an enigma is only fun if you're at least half-way to solving it after 134 minutes."

Time Out's Geoff Andrews calls it a "rather affecting study of male loneliness, loyalty and escapism."

Update, 5/28: Jason Solomons in the Observer: "[I]t's a comedy about power, status, hunter-gatherers, tennis, fossils, fisticuffs, dependency, bonding and loyalty. I think it's far better than anyone gave it credit for."

Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2006 5:51 AM