Some of the funniest, most well-deserved slaps in screen history.

| Dec 15, 2023

There’s something special and unique about Desplechin’s film; after it fades into the end credits, it’s hard to escape the world it’s created.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2023

Though A Christmas Tale clocks in at 152 minutes, it never feels tired or fails to compel.

| Oct 12, 2019

Catherine Deneuve, for her part, is luminous as always. But the entire film feels cold and distant, and fatally unfocused.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 7, 2019

Un Comte de Noel is a long, rambling story of a bourgeois family going into dysfunctional overdrive during a reunion at the parental home.

| Dec 15, 2017

If you are intrigued by the interpersonal relationships and entanglements of a family - maybe a lot like yours and mine - this film is a fascinating exposé that might well prompt some seasonal self-reflection.

| Dec 15, 2017

A Christmas Tale has bountiful charm in the first leg of the film, mainly because it is able to take a lovely, dry wit to its characters' bitterness.

| Dec 13, 2017

[Desplechin] has skill, patience, empathy, and insight; quickened by the holiday occasion, they make the title of his film ultimately, if unconventionally, right.

| Dec 10, 2014

It takes about half an hour of screen time, until everyone gets packed into the house, for A Christmas Tale to reveal its nature fully: expansive in narrative scheme, compact in emotional space and self-consciously auteurist to the core.

| Dec 10, 2014

It's a bracingly eccentric, waspishly intelligent blast of flashbacks, freeze frames, split screens, and bizarre music choices.

| Dec 10, 2014

Not since, well, Kings & Queen has calling something overstuffed been such a compliment.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 10, 2014

Perfect off-season timing for a wickedly off-kilter movie about a French family Christmas in extremis.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 10, 2014

Given his cornucopia of characters fighting wars on three fronts, his whiplash tonal switchbacks, his jazzlike aesthetic of chance, how is it that Arnaud Desplechin is only now coming home for the holidays?

| Jul 8, 2014

As the rituals of Christmas are observed, the family edges closer towards a sense of understanding and acceptance in a picture that captures a sense of life's messy uncertainties and the way we sometimes hurt the ones we love the most.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2013

It's maddening and it's exhilarating.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2013

A Christmas Tale's more universal qualities should be apparent to anyone who has survived a Christmas, and God help us, here comes another one.

| Dec 6, 2013

Its numerous narrative strands are neither revealingly pursued nor properly intertwined.

| Dec 6, 2013

A Christmas Tale has a classical feel, even though the mischievous Desplechin tosses in shadow puppets, iris shots, and actors speaking directly to the camera. It's this ability to surprise that gives the film its spark.

| Original Score: B | Dec 6, 2013

Desplechin's film is so well cast and the relationships so authentically depicted that it's okay not to be completely or partially taken by Junon, Henri, and the rest of their kin.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2013

A Christmas Tale is a lively, capricious, mischievous ensemble delight.

| Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 6, 2013