Poison Friends.

"Poison Friends revives a rare pleasure of moviegoing: articulacy." Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE: "Ten years ago Phillip Lopate diagnosed a 'Dumbing Down of American Movies,' and the disproportionate praise given to reactionary 'realism' in recent indies suggests that, as expectations shrivel, things have gotten stupider across the board. But Poison Friends, written by frequent Arnaud Desplechin scenarists Emmanuel Bordieu and Marcia Romano, defies the tendency, investing the same raucous humanity into the world of ideas that marked the academic milieu of Desplechin's My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument."

Updated through 5/1.

It's "atmospherically and unmistakably French," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It also has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies. André and his acolytes may be pretentious and self-dramatizing, but there is nothing slack about them, or about this film."

"The real triumph of Bourdieu's disciplined plotting is that he never condescends to his characters by turning them into wisecracking miscreants for the sake of enlivening every frame," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Earlier: Leslie Camhi in the New York Times; "Wrapping NYFF." and "Cannes. Les Amities Malefiques."

Update, 4/28: "[T]he milieu is fascinating, the performances are casually terrific across the board, and Bourdieu's knack for hyperliterate gamesmanship partially fills the void left by Whit Stillman, whose Metropolitan is an unmistakable influence — though the tone here is less affectionate, more corrosive," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

Update, 5/1: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic: "The story's conclusion verges on the grim, and it underscores Bourdieu's presumable theme: student life and talk are the last real vacations in many lives."

Posted by dwhudson at April 27, 2007 1:11 PM