We’re accustomed to Dumont leapfrogging from one genre to another, but he has seldom attempted so many swerves and shifts as he manages here. France, like the director, makes for a pleasing guessing game.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 3, 2023

Doughty Léa Seydoux does her best with this toothless and tedious media satire, but not even two hours of verklempt close-ups can save a movie with so little to say.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 3, 2023

France is watchable, if not subtle, but the picture labours its message with an overstretched running time and an oddly anticlimactic structure.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2023

Thanks to her [Léa Seydoux's] performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 28, 2022

Whatever its flaws, this movie provides fans of French star Léa Seydoux with a treat.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 27, 2022

Something here feels lost in translation. "France" is like trying to complete a puzzle when one of the pieces is missing.

| Original Score: C | Feb 3, 2022

[A] tasty and nutritious bouillabaisse of a film...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 27, 2022

Even when it's outlining its own ideas more through rhetoric than character, "France" keeps us on our toes regarding what's around the corner.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2022

Dumont's signature inscrutability remains intriguing but perhaps more frivolous here; Seydoux's inspired performance helps to ground it.

| Jan 15, 2022

With Seydoux, we believe in France's reality. Her despair runs deep and suggests depths within this woman that are hidden to herself.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 5, 2022

It's a fantastic movie... It's very pointed and very funny.

| Dec 24, 2021

[Léa Seydoux] is very good in the movie. If a lesser actress were in it, it wouldn't be worth seeing.

| Dec 24, 2021

As usual, Dumont is a more interesting director than screenwriter.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 10, 2021

In part because of the depth of Seydoux's performance, the film becomes less an allegory of a nation and more a gripping character study, a portrait of a mask of personal and professional regard slowly slipping away.

| Dec 10, 2021

A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.

| Dec 9, 2021

[Dumont] is more than capable of making movies that are engaging on a level beyond the purely intellectual. France, for the most part, isn't one of them.

| Original Score: C+ | Dec 8, 2021

Amid the film's riotous satire involving tricked-out news and political distortions, Dumont plants a melancholy melodrama of an identity crisis...

| Dec 6, 2021

Bruno Dumont's France is an interesting send-up of a fame-obsessed culture...

| Sep 20, 2021

For those willing to take it seriously, there's a lot here to unpack. The rest will probably just reach for the remote.

| Jul 21, 2021

France sometimes feels like a state-of-the-nation address written in invisible ink.

| Jul 18, 2021