"Abuse of Weakness" is 20 minutes of a great movie and another 85 minutes of nothing much.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 2, 2014

Shot with clean, spare simplicity by the Dardennes' regular DP Alain Marcoen, this is a very simple work, almost prosaically so at times-as if Breillat wanted to purge the film of anything that wasn't strictly to the point.

| Sep 15, 2014

With clinical dispassion and narrative elegance, Breillat has constructed what she calls "a thriller about denial."

| Aug 22, 2014

The film's title refers to the French legal term for taking advantage of a person of diminished capacity. The story, though, suggests other interpretations.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 21, 2014

As a portrait of what it's like to be suddenly helpless, Abuse Of Weakness is never less than fascinating ...

| Original Score: B | Aug 21, 2014

This examination of power, greed, emotional manipulation and simple need is gripping and powerful to behold even if you don't know the story behind the story.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 15, 2014

[A] chilly, dark portrait of two control freaks locking horns.

| Aug 14, 2014

Breillat's self-conscious refusal to establish a realistic basis for this deeply mismatched relationship winds up weakening the film irreparably.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 14, 2014

The plot, though never less than engaging, occasionally tests believability - until you remember it's drawn from Breillat's life.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 14, 2014

Abuse Of Weakness is the director's attempt to account for actions that seem inexplicable, and make the audience understand and sympathize in kind.

| Original Score: 3.5/5.0 | Aug 13, 2014

Breillat's impressive film is a study of bodies and how we carry them, and it explores the manner in which weakness seeks out strength on an almost primal level, bypassing the higher modes of human thought.

| Aug 12, 2014

It's hard to imagine an actress other than Huppert so artfully layering frailty and toughness, self-delusion and self-awareness, and her complex portrayal is an irresistible foil to Kool Shen's blank expressions and wounded swagger.

| Jul 7, 2014

Catherine Breillat's scripting of Maud as fatally distant from her family, willfully independent, but more believably abandoned, is haunting.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 1, 2013

The movie is interesting to think about as another of the Anatomy Of Hell director's power-struggle portraits, even if its conceit-by design-leaves the question of how the filmmaker allowed a known operator to bilk her out of so much money unresolved.

Full Review | Original Score: b- | Sep 13, 2013

Like in all of the director's work, psychologically reductive readings of the characters are absent, though intriguing performances give audiences a way into the material.

| Sep 13, 2013

Catherine Breillat's films have always been autobiographical, often painfully so, and yet "Abuse of Weakness" cuts even closer to the marrow than the rest.

| Sep 6, 2013