Un conte de Noël 2008

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: It's a simple picture about complicated people, the members and sometime-combatants of the extended Vuillard family. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: These infuriating, involving individuals are so resolutely themselves, so sure they are right by their own lights, they exist in a world beyond anyone's judgment. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: A Christmas Tale is a bad dream with just enough distance to give us a midwinter's night's laugh. Read more

Andrea Gronvall, Chicago Reader: Characters occasionally address the camera, which helps disentangle the competing story lines of madness, adultery, and betrayal. Read more

Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times: There are simply too many marvels to tally. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: Despite occasional bouts of tedium over the epic course, a surprising buoyancy emerges: Desplechin's methods begin to inform, even brighten, the message. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: It's the definition of a film meant to be admired more than loved, but Desplechin's fierce intelligence and uncompromising sense of character come through. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: To tweak Tolstoy: All happy families may be alike, but all unhappy-family movies are entertaining in their own ways. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: I'd be more inclined to call this French dysfunctional family epic gabby and preeningly self-indulgent -- in a word, annoying. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: Out of the most ordinary ingredients -- an ailing mother, estranged adult siblings, a good meal ruined by bad behavior -- the endlessly inventive French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin has made the old look fresh in A Christmas Tale. Read more

Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: Followed by Desplechina(TM)s restless camera, they roam the house, which is at once a lived-in haven and a mausoleum filled with the relics of past battles and shifting alliances. Read more

Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic: [Desplechin] has skill, patience, empathy, and insight; quickened by the holiday occasion, they make the title of his film ultimately, if unconventionally, right. Read more

David Ansen, Newsweek: Desplechin is an inspired impurist. His Christmas Tale is untidy, overstuffed and delicious: a genuine holiday feast. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: Watching A Christmas Tale is like getting to know a family other than your own by leafing through its scrapbooks and laughing at its photograph albums, while it bickers in the next room over stuff you may never understand. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: Wry, observant and frequently heartbreaking. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: If Ingmar Bergman and Wes Anderson some how collaborated on a movie together, I'd guess their sensibilities would yield something like Arnaud Desplechin's darkly hilarious, brilliantly acted A Christmas Tale. Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times: After two and a half hours in the thrilling, exhausting company of the characters in A Christmas Tale, the intimacy we feel with them is wired with surprise. Read more

Andrew Sarris, New York Observer: A Christmas Tale is a film experience to be seen and savored for its exquisite delineation of human feelings and foibles. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Roiling with laughter, tears, drunken confessions, revelatory soliloquies, pain, sorrow, hospital visits, and various kinds of love, A Christmas Tale is a smart, sprawling, and sublimely entertaining feast. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: A Christmas Tale is long but it exerts enough of a pull that the 150 minutes pass rapidly, if not necessarily painlessly. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: A strangely encompassing collection of private moments among the members of a large family with a fraught history. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Dark secrets are unlocked, words draw more blood than punches, and [director] Desplechin turns one family into a universe that resembles life as a startling work of art. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: A marvelously rich visual, intellectual and emotional experience, one that I expect will grow deeper with repeat viewings. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Getting through these first 20 minutes is as necessary as plowing through the first 50 pages of a 19th century novel. Once that work is over, the movie's singular pleasures reveal themselves. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: In this dark comedy everyone is at the end of someone else's strings. Read more

Linda Barnard, Toronto Star: [It] will make anyone dreading the holidays with their family grateful for what strife they may face. It's nothing compared to what the Vuillard clan gets up to. Read more

Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine: A triumph of willed optimism (or perhaps more accurately, of grudging good nature) over unhappy experiences... Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: You could, of course, forgive the whole enterprise as the extravagances of an intellectual fairytale, but the film's wayward eccentricities outweigh its good performances and breezy telling of a jumble of a plot. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Some wry humor runs through the course of the overly long saga. But there's not enough dark wit to mitigate the tedium and pretentiousness. Read more

Derek Elley, Variety: Never devolves into a tedious two-and-a-half hours of self-examination. But it also never goes very far, either. Read more

J. Hoberman, Village Voice: Deft, playful, fluid, haunting, and filled with the joy of filmmaking. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Even though it's pretentious and overlong, A Christmas Tale is still maddeningly engaging, thanks in large part to its attractive and gifted cast. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: A long, improbably funny and very beautiful film. Read more