French Exit is the perfect mixture between drama and extremely dry humor. Michelle Pfeiffer exudes elegance with every scene she's in, and Lucas Hedges plays his usual endearing, supportive character.

| Apr 23, 2024

The film encourages a message of making the best of things but there is an aloofness to engage meaningfully with these characters.

| Aug 30, 2023

With beautiful reflections about love and life, aided by romantic views of Paris in the winter, French Exit offers a sensitive and empathetic lens on someone that is suddenly at odds with her life.

| Original Score: A | Mar 20, 2023

Indie darling Azazel Jacobs’s film is a strange mix of causticity and ambivalence

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 9, 2022

French Exit may be excessively eccentric, but Michelle Pfeiffer’s powerhouse performance provides the film with a witty warmth.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Both Pfeiffer and Frances fit right into the movie’s chief goal of addressing privilege and upper-class entitlement with a wry satirical bite. I just wish the rest of the movie fit as nicely.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 17, 2022

The adaptation of Patrick deWitts novel lumbers to a close, eventually overwhelmed by its own silliness. Still, for all its technical shortcomings, the film has drawn one of the great performances of its stars career.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2022

Written with grace and wit by Patrick deWitt, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel, this is one of those charming films that won't change your life, but it will feel like a warm mug of tea on a cold Sunday evening.

| Dec 29, 2021

Melancholic, world-weary, darkly funny, and strangely lovely, it gifts so much more than it promises, just like its heroine.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2021

Pfeiffer does the lion's share of the work, and while it's not a career-defining role, it reminds us of just how much gravitas and strength come with her performance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 8, 2021

It's not as scathing as Molière or as weird as Buñuel, but it is suffused with a genial kindness and clever turns of phrase - this film could soothe a troubled soul or stir up revolutionary fervor.

| Sep 9, 2021

Best to see director Azazel Jacobs' film as a throwback to 1930s screwball comedies, which were similarly indulgent towards the madcap antics of the rich and privileged.

| Sep 2, 2021

A glam and gloomy comedy that, for all the talent on board, only gets traction from the performance by Michelle Pfeiffer, who is sensational in a nuanced, multi-faceted role

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 30, 2021

French Exit lives and dies on the power of Michelle Pfeiffer's lead performance: she swans through every scene with a morbid sort of vitality, inventing quirks of her eyebrows and unconventional line readings that no one's ever heard before.

| Aug 28, 2021

Pfeiffer's command of the material is so complete that she keeps you on side even when the material itself gets derailed.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2021

But of course, a star vehicle for the luminescent Pfeiffer means the actress stands out and carries the film with the grace and style that made her a star decades ago.

| Jul 16, 2021

[A]s a vehicle for Pfeiffer to show off her immaculate purr it suffices.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2021

Based on a waspish book by Patrick deWitt, the quirky story works on the page but not on screen.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 6, 2021

If you're in the mood for something quirky and cool - it split reviewers, mind - then this Paris-set adaptation of Patrick deWitt's novel of the same name may do wonders for your ability to give zero you-know-whats.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 3, 2021

There's no ostensible plot. Just scenes. And a running gag about the reincarnated soul of the family cat. And not one, but two aggressively unfunny "comedy" seance sequences. An endurance test.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 3, 2021