Unfortunately all the metafictional layering only highlights the lack of engagement at the center of the story, the three stars acting up a storm but barely acknowledging each other.

| Apr 17, 2020

Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg momentarily bring verve to proceedings.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 9, 2018

Decked out in the classy colours of the high-end French art film, Ismael's Ghosts is probably easier to enjoy if you make no attempt to fit its disjointed units together.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 8, 2018

Like one of the thin-skinned, self-sabotaging protagonists that inhabit his films, director Arnaud Desplechin takes a promising premise and turns it into a spiralling vortex of shouty navel-gazing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 3, 2018

This director's cut might smack of self-indulgence, but it also says much about love and loss and the language of an artform that flirts with realism while remaining an illusion.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 1, 2018

It's rarely boring, but golly it's indulgent.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 1, 2018

To nobody's surprise, Desplechin keeps a lot of plates spinning effortlessly.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 1, 2018

A multi-character mess...

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 30, 2018

It's all very artfully done, with plenty of inventive camera work by Irina Lubtchansky. But I found it unsatisfying, even as a slice of life; it seemed more of a julienne.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 20, 2018

There are moments in this movie that are richer than anything you can possibly see in a movie theater this month, scenes that will fill you with awe.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 18, 2018

Ismael's Ghosts drops a number of seemingly disparate ingredients into a stew that ends up coalescing into a satisfying treat, full of surprises and flavors you wouldn't expect.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 12, 2018

It's true that, even on a more complete viewing, not everything in "Ismael's Ghosts" coheres. If it did, I suspect the movie would not feel quite so alive.

| Apr 5, 2018

As Ismael, Almaric grounds the unwieldy film...delivering an incisive performance that imbues his subtlest gestures with searing turmoil.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 4, 2018

Desplechin mines his earlier films and his cultural obsessions for a formidable trove of narrative complications, which he flings into the script with admirable abandon but without directorial audacity to match.

| Mar 26, 2018

There's one scene -- in which Cotillard dances alone to Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" while Gainsbourg looks on quietly -- that might have you begging for the earth to open up and swallow you whole.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 23, 2018

Arnaud Desplechin loves stories - the ones you show on a screen, that people regale others with that reveal delusions and dreams, that we tell ourselves in order to survive.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 23, 2018

The film feels very personal, as if writer/director Arnaud Desplechin were sorting out his thoughts, processes and demons onscreen.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 23, 2018

Desplechin is here to remind us that all readings are subjective, that stories end differently depending on who's doing the telling and who's doing the listening.

| Mar 22, 2018

Multiple meanings are Desplechin's bread and butter and the fertile terrain of his mostly wonderful films. Like Ismael, though, he seems to have lost the thread that will tie together his stories and generate something for us to chew over.

| Mar 22, 2018

An unforgettable experience.

| Mar 22, 2018