Runs out of steam after about 80 or 90 minutes but it's an involving enough black comedy with a very dysfunctional family at the center.

As a big fan of The Family Stone (2005) it wasn't long before I caught the parallels. But this is France, land of existentialism and comfortable with tragedy, so the sugar coating literally none of us experience in real life, is also here entirely absent. It's the difference between a cold glass of dry white wine and a coke. I have room in my life for both, but give me a choice and the wine will win. The family of characters are riveting and performed by some of the greatest of film actors, Deneuve and Mathieu Almaric amongst them. I laughed and I certainly cried, and I gasped - and this was the third time watched.

Featuring a variety of different cinematic styles, a large cast that is initially difficult to sort out, and the sporadic use of some distracting gimmicks, including matte shots, split screens, freeze frames, and more than one character speaking directly to the audience, it's safe to say that A Christmas Tale is probably not for all tastes. Junon (Catherine Deneuve), the matriarch of the family, suffers from leukemia and summons her family to return home for Christmas in order to explore the possibility of a donor for a bone marrow transplant. Similar to The Royal Tenenbaums, the film features interesting characters, fantastic dialogue, and great performances from the cast. For those who can overlook the film's aforementioned quirks and a lengthy running time, it has the opportunity to be a rewarding experience.

This movie made me regret ever learning french. I generally enjoy french cinema, but this film is nothing but the pedantic and pretentious drivel of an incestuous and unlikeable family. It never ties up its loose ends, the editing is clumsy and bizarre and continuity is mediocre at best. Came off like a lazy ego trip and I genuinely regret the 2.5 hours (did i forget to mention how long it is??) that I dedicated to it. If watching this movie weren't an assignment I would have ducked out after 45 minutes, and I can honestly say that I don't feel that it redeemed itself at all after that 45 minutes. Maybe I'm not artsy enough to delight in this asinine imitation of an intellectual film, but I don't feel any worse for not "getting" it. Catherine Deneuve was wonderful, however.

It delivers on the black but barely on the comedy, yet A CHRISTMAS TALE is a beautiful tale of familial dysfunction, lifelong struggle, and redemption for even the worst.

An interesting tale about a dysfunctional family that gets together for the holidays, as their matriarch is in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. As each family member's story unfolds we see that no matter what has messed up your family is, being in one is inescapable.

Quite a poser. Not for everyone. Excellent.

Extremely fine construction of perhaps too many plot points yet expertly acted with each actor used to their characters advantage

It's interesting enough but too long and gets tiring at some point. I guess there should be some cuts.

It's definitely artistic and unamerican (am i being redundant?), and it's not something that's easy to digest. That said, it contains real people and real emotions, something sadly missing from most movies these days. Highly recommend watching it on Christmas time using boxxy software app. After viewing, i felt as if i had spent Christmas with the family - a neat trick.

French family dramedy is as earnest and ambitious as it is overlong and uneven.

The ensemble cast drama is impressive with the great french actors playing family characters living uncontrollable lives.

A story of mistakes, and how we spend so much of our time making more mistakes to try and correct them.

Today is Christmas Day, so it is the most apposite time to watch this French drama, rife with cancer, marrow transplant, siblings rivalry, unstable mentality, chronic depression, familial incest and distant mother-child relationship, very Christmasy! A follow-up of KINGS & QUEEN (2004, 6/10), French art house director Arnaud Desplechin concocts a fine potpourri of familial entanglements around the bourgeois Vuillard family, opens with a consequential animated preamble of the loss of their eldest son Joseph at the age of 6 due to a hereditary blood disease while no compatible marrow transplant is found in both parents, the daughter Elizabeth (Consigny) and the second son Henri (Amalric), who is conceived to offer a cure to his elder brother. But time goes on, a third son Ivan (Poupaud) is born, and now they are all grown-ups, then the matriarch Junon (Denueve) discovers that she suffers from the same disease, the only compatible donors are Henri and Elizabeth's son Paul (Berling), hence this Christmas, a family reunion is endowed with a more grave determinant, especially for the black sheep in the family Henri, after a 6-year banishment (due to an unspecified riff with Elizabeth), his return with his new Jewish girlfriend Faunia (Devos) will undoubtedly thrust the tension with Elizabeth's family and have an impact on Junon's final resolve to her impending treatment. Screen time is almost equally allotted to the all-star cast with their own stories intermingle in a short span of the timeline, although the main stream focuses on Henri and Junon's reconciliation, but it is not a beatific movie to bury the hatchet and embrace a pristine future, every family has its distinctive script written with plenitude of relatable interactions, notably, the mutual attraction between Ivan's wife Sylvia (played by Chiara Mastroianni, Denueve's real life daughter with Marcello Mastroianni) and Ivan's cousin Simon (Capelluto) clicks wonderfully in the latter part of the film, it is very French as well, for moralistic puritans and prudes, it is a sheer crevice in their convictions which will prompt harsh opprobrium. One trait of superfluity is the chunk of monologues, colloquies with staccato coherence, loose ends are all over the place, we can never decipher the real motivations and reasons behind certain behaviors which adhere to a particular terrain of mores; also the peephole shots introduces each chapter gives the film a stage structure and the occasional talk-to-the-camera shtick often comes out of nowhere, they may variegate the viewers' recipiency but are inconsistent in the plot development and engender some distractions hinder the appreciation. Amalric and Mastroianni are my pick among the ensemble, he is a true thespian with utter devotion while she bears her father's resemblance and an arresting existence whenever she is on screen. Devos is enjoyable as an unobtrusive intruder (reminds me to watch an Angela Basset film), Denueve is as distant as always, graceful but stereotyped, Poupaud is too damn good-looking for his shyness and benevolence and Consigny is perpetually frowned and distressed, enclosed in her own little world, one might feel too depressed to invest in her. In conclusion, it is not your average Christmas flick, but a less chic showpiece about kindred liaisons than Assayas' SUMMER HOURS (2008, 8/10).

I can't give this film a 10/10, but it is overall enjoyable, and it is also quite fun to watch.

Ranskalaista ja pitkäveteistä.

A French, slightly less intriguing Royal Tenenbaums.

Knotty family drama that brings together various squabbles between siblings, wifes and girlfriends at Christmas; a particular special occasion due to the fragile future of the matriarch of the family - Catherine Deneuve - who has been diagnosed with Cancer. Whilst it's a tad baggy in places, this is an interesting and likeable film, nonetheless.

This is a very smart film and I enjoyed it immensely as part of my holiday viewing this year. Challenging in a way that "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" never aspired to be, this one rewards the viewer (at least this viewer) in different ways. Arnaud Desplechin directed this idiosyncratic and unorthodox tale about members of a dysfunctional family who come together over the course of 4 days for a strained and animosity-filled Christmas reunion. Sound depressing? Or at the very least, entertaining in a lowbrow "Jerry Springer" mudfest kind of way? Well, not to worry, mon ami. On the square, this film is no downer - it is on the contrary quite life-affirming...if you've got your inner tuning fork adjusted to the right frequency. As for being "Jerry Springer"-esque, nothing on that show was ever articulate or erudite, existential or human. This film is all of those things. At its heart "A Christmas Tale" is a celebration of our contradictions and complexities as human beings, and how they affect the family dynamic. Much of the film's success and appeal is due to its cast of richly hewn and interestingly developed characters, a self-labeled "bunch of weirdos". The Catherine Deneuve-led ensemble of actors (and I mean, "actors") are all superb, especially (for my money) Jean-Paul Roussillon as Abel, the Vuillard family patriarch; Mathieu Amalric as Henri, the middle Vuillard child, the "black sheep" of the family; and Chiara Mastroianni as Sylvia, the wife of Ivan, the youngest Vuillard child. The film is paced expertly well and the narrative form is perfectly suited to its subject matter and large group of characters. Another of the film's many strengths is its lush photography, shot in brilliant colours and soft tones. The Vuillard family home in Roubaix is warm and inviting (Henri even mentions to his girlfriend that "I always thought that this place was so great") - it's full of books and music and the Christmas tree becomes magnificent before our very eyes. It snows prettily outside for almost the entire duration of the get-together. The music on the film's soundtrack sometimes seems out of place, but somehow it all manages to fit anyway. All of these elements are in stark contrast to the drama and turmoil of the family's story being played out in the narrative, creating dichotomies of ugliness versus beauty, sadness versus joy, hatred versus love - just like real, everyday life. Of course, this is all intentional on the part of director Desplechin...and it all works, beautifully. On a side note, I venture that director Desplechin is fond of Ingmar Bergman as I felt a lot of the Swedish master's influence throughout the proceedings. There's also quite a bit of Shakespeare in this 'tale' - soliloquies into the camera, a deliciously-composed letter, there's even a 'play within the play' as it were. From the film -- "We, seekers of knowledge, remain unknown to ourselves with good reason: we have never sought ourselves. How should we some day find ourselves? Our treasure is to be found in the beehives of knowledge. Bees always searching, collectors of the honey of the mind, our hearts are set on one thing: bringing something home... As for the rest, as for life with its so-called experiences, who among us takes them seriously? Who has the time? Who hears the clock striking twelve? And, once roused, asks himself: 'What did the clock just strike?' In this way, we rub our ears after the fact and ask ourselves, surprised: 'What have we experienced?' Then we try, after the fact, as I just said, to count back over the twelve strokes of our experience, our life, our being, and lose count in the process. We are unknown to ourselves. We do not understand ourselves. Concerning ourselves, we are not seekers of knowledge." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche "On the Genealogy of Morals"

French. Relationships. Great acting.