Ozon’s translation is a playful addition to the canon. It may lack the bitterness that Fassbinder skilfully worked into his film and its title, but it compensates with unmissable glass-throwing, door-slamming romantic agony.

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

For anyone who has seen that movie [The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant]... there’s plenty to enjoy here, as Ozon tweaks, twists and sporadically subverts the original and infuses it with ironic camp.

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

Moments that shine through, but feels too much like an intellectual experiment.

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

Enjoyable as this is, it sometimes feels like an academic exercise... Nevertheless, mediocre Ozon is still vastly better than many a director’s finest effort, and Ménochet’s sublime performance is worth seeing in all its opera buffa grandeur.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 22, 2022

An entertaining French billet doux to a German titan. It’s a small-scale touching tribute, filled with equal amounts human tenderness and self-disgust, which is perhaps just what Fassbinder would have wanted.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2022

The casting of the meaty, magnetic Ménochet... is smart: his resemblance to Fassbinder adds a self-referential layer to the drama.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 18, 2022

I like this film quite a lot, but it's much more enjoyable if you already know Fassbinder.

| Sep 10, 2022

Francois Ozon's Peter von Kant is an odd, chilly film, even by this director's standards.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 6, 2022

An entertaining, sublimely acted movie of gay male obsession and comeuppance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 2, 2022

But filmmaking for Fassbinder was always a matter of life and death; there was a sense that he would kill himself to finish a movie. Ozon too often treats moviemaking like a hastily planned party he’s giving with a starry guest list.

| Sep 2, 2022

A smashing melodrama.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 1, 2022

Ozon’s often tedious tragicomedy never hits [its] stride, trusting that the material will automatically confer greatness; instead, “Peter” comes off like top-shelf fan-fiction.

| Sep 1, 2022

At times this admiring but uninspired making-of movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Karl/Marlene character: fawning to the point of sycophancy.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 31, 2022

There’s ultimately a lack of authentic emotion and dimension to the whole enterprise. (Again, maybe the point. And yet.)

| Aug 31, 2022

Ozon’s film is billed as “freely adapted” from the Fassbinder, but for the most part, it’s remarkably faithful. That said, the French filmmaker has very much made it his own...

| Feb 12, 2022

For all the histrionics, this is a lot more genial, campy and comic than Fassbinder’s gaunt ordeal.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 11, 2022

The breath of life and beating heart at the center of countless, Russian nesting doll layers of artifice and art-house reference, actor Denis Menochet doesn’t just anchor Peter von Kant, he makes the Francois Ozon project a film.

| Original Score: B | Feb 10, 2022

Where Fassbinder crafted extraordinary tableaux of self-parodic misery... Ozon breezes through this exercise instead with his usual snappy relish. He has plenty to say about the original’s magnificence, but perhaps not an awful lot to add.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 10, 2022

Both homage and critique, Peter von Kant astutely gets under the skin of the lesbian-themed original, ekes out new resonances and proves both authentically Fassbinderian and altogether Ozonesque in its ironic sensibilities.

| Feb 10, 2022