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

| 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

It's maddening and it's exhilarating.

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

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

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

Despite occasional bouts of tedium over the epic course, a surprising buoyancy emerges: Desplechin's methods begin to inform, even brighten, the message.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 6, 2013

Desplechin is an inspired impurist. His Christmas Tale is untidy, overstuffed and delicious: a genuine holiday feast.

| Dec 6, 2013

A compellingly literate exploration of the muddle of misguided motives and lingering regrets that bind families together.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 16, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 16, 2009

The film is almost as involving as it is infuriating.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 16, 2009

The effect is strange, disconcerting - but never dull. I think what Desplechin has created is not a conventional drama, but a sort of dream-ensemble masque: a choreographed parade of ideas, emotions, personae. A film to ponder, and to savour.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 16, 2009

The cast expertly incarnates this family haunted by loss, lovelessness and (literal) bad blood, but the film's unduly protracted duration makes the Vuillards feel like Christmas guests who just will not leave.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2009

A Christmas Tale is a compelling domestic drama, a French art gem to inaugurate 2009.

| Jan 16, 2009

There's a giddiness to this whirling dervish of a film, with its spastic skipping from character and catharsis, its near fetishistic camera trickery, bursts of song, and loving lifts from the likes of Vertigo and Nietzsche.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 19, 2008

[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.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 5, 2008

A triumph of willed optimism (or perhaps more accurately, of grudging good nature) over unhappy experiences...

| Dec 5, 2008

Never devolves into a tedious two-and-a-half hours of self-examination. But it also never goes very far, either.

| Dec 5, 2008

A Christmas Tale's expansive stew of physical and psychological illness, death, betrayal, longing, religion, and ritual ultimately proves invigoratingly lush.

| Original Score: B+ | Nov 29, 2008

Yet as the film progresses these multifarious layers of dramatic ennui and vitriol becomes absolutely intoxicating, and before I knew it my eyes were glued to the screen and I almost couldn't wait to see what was going to happen next.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 26, 2008

Characters occasionally address the camera, which helps disentangle the competing story lines of madness, adultery, and betrayal.

| Nov 21, 2008