You cannot help but admire the beautifully shot views and the solid performances.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 18, 2019

Casting, acting, production values, scripting and pacing all make for grand entertainment for discriminating filmgoers.

| Mar 1, 2007

Unfortunately, that same suspense -- Poisoned wine! Secret pacts! Doppelgangers! -- is sometimes a little too stiff, making Monsieur N. play at times like a second-tier Agatha Christie mystery.

| Apr 14, 2005

Exile is a complicated business for Napoleon Bonaparte.

| Apr 8, 2005

This richly produced tale of the last years of the famous 19th-century conqueror has a certain captivating quality about it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 7, 2005

de Caunes has mounted a handsome production, [but] the film's "surprises" are inherently predictable...

Full Review | Mar 24, 2005

A film of polished ensemble performances, burnished period interiors and fine landscapes, but it's a little bloodless.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 10, 2005

Though at over two hours the movie is too long and too slow, de Caunes sustains a sense of mystery and ambiguity to the end of what is both a satisfying character study and a stately quasi-thriller for amateur historians.

Full Review | Mar 10, 2005

a disaster

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Mar 8, 2005

As modest conspiracy-mongering, the movie is perfectly robust, earning its dramatic impact from its classical sense of intrigue and Philippe Torreton's testy performance in the title role.

Full Review | Jan 25, 2005

Even when the script takes a turn for the chatty, there's always something pretty to look at.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 21, 2005

Pretentious and melodramatic.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 21, 2005

Screenwriter Rene Manzor weaves a tangled web of speculation, but de Caunes, following his vampire feature debut Love Bites, has no clue how to dramatize this intrigue.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 21, 2005

Dramatically dense, neatly thesped and visually involving.

Full Review | Jan 20, 2005

Monsieur N, Antoine de Caunes's densely plotted costume drama, suggests that Napoleon's demise might have been an elaborate hoax through which he escaped into anonymity.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 20, 2005

Handsomely designed and photographed, impeccably played, and both satisfyingly complex and ingeniously plausible.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 14, 2004

With some excellent staging, fine cinematography and first-rate acting, the film largely overcomes the awe it demonstrates for its principal character and succeeds in creating a mystery where perhaps there is none.

Full Review | May 4, 2004

A turgid mystery thriller.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 20, 2004

'Monsieur N.' is fine old-time cinema.

| Mar 1, 2004

The mystery is intriguing, but the film never sorts fact from fiction, adding romantic complications that don't draws us in and filling scenes with wordy but irrelevant nonsense.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 29, 2003