What comes out in the storytelling is the way our actions emerge from a tangle of sympathies, personal loyalties or debts owed, preexisting relationships we take for granted, and professed ideologies.

| Jul 31, 2023

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2008

Though not one of Rohmer best films, it's worth seeing for the acting and the dialogue which magnify the glory of the French language. Amazingly, at 81, Rohmer continues to be productive; rejection of film by Cannes Festival stirred controversy in 2001

| Original Score: B- | Feb 14, 2007

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2006

Who would have thought that in the year of Spider-Man and Attack of the Clones, the year's most innovative use of special effects would come in a film about the French Revolution?

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jan 15, 2005

Rohmer's playful style is often good fun. And Russell is especially compelling. But honestly, it's fairly hard going.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 8, 2004

At 135-minutes, this stream-of-facts lecture trembles into the trenches of monotony without the detraction of technology.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 22, 2003

My problem with The Lady and the Duke is not Rohmer's ostensibly pro-Royalist politics, but his now reactionary aesthetics.

| Oct 5, 2002

Rohmer's novel, exhilarating and elegant work with painted scenery and digital equipment is a revelation. But this work is stuck in a film in which the foreground action is sleep-inducing by comparison.

Full Review | Oct 3, 2002

Leave it to Rohmer, now 82, to find a way to bend current technique to the service of a vision of the past that is faithful to both architectural glories and commanding open spaces of the city as it was more than two centuries ago.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 27, 2002

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 9, 2002

Not only has Rohmer reinvented the costume drama with The Lady and the Duke, he makes the case that the genre is worth reinventing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 3, 2002

Rohmer makes a gracious, if occasionally tedious, effort to dress the French Revolution in digitally rendered scenes that bespeak the period perfectly.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 2, 2002

Seldom has the elegant past of 18th century royal life married modern filmmaking with the grace and sophistication of Eric Rohmer's L'anglaise et le duc.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 2, 2002

To the vast majority of more casual filmgoers, it will probably be a talky bore.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 2, 2002

Watching The Lady And The Duke is like looking at a really fine play.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2002

Nothing short of a technical marvel and a ravishing movie to look at.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 26, 2002

Working from Elliott's memoir, Rohmer fashions the sort of delicate, articulate character- and- relationship study he's favored for decades.

| Jul 26, 2002

Whenever the subtleties of political morality get a bit overbearing, there's a respite in the painterly streets of Paris, where, we are reminded, the past was another city, strange and resistant to present-day adornments.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 26, 2002

The Lady and the Duke is a smart, romantic drama that dares to depict the French Revolution from the aristocrats' perspective.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 25, 2002