[Emmanuel Bourdieu] turns a standard coming-of-age premise -- four young literary scholars compete for recognition at a Paris university -- into a biting academic fable.

| Jul 31, 2014

A much too tidy insightful clinical tale about students dealing with academic life and the pains of growing up.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 15, 2010

There are some schematics at work in the screenplay, but the film proves to be an entertaining, if frustrating, experience.

| Original Score: B | Jul 14, 2007

This clever little film explodes conceptions and presents a good argument for the ends justifying the means.

| Original Score: B | Jul 4, 2007

The dialogue in "Poison Friends" is clever and erudite, but underneath the lit-crit the film has the atmosphere of a Hitchcockian thriller.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 29, 2007

Poison Friends is at once a sly satire on the pretensions and aspirations of academia and an intellectual suspense-thriller that builds and builds but never loses credibility.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 24, 2007

It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 24, 2007

While the young people chatter about life and literature with sometimes overbearing self-satisfaction, the astute filmmaker observes their pretentious gum-flapping with a mixture of amusement, compassion, and wised-up rue.

| Original Score: A- | May 9, 2007

Turgid ivory-tower drama.

| Original Score: 2/6 | Apr 28, 2007

In this observant psychological drama with the energy of a thriller, there's no blood (except for maybe a paper cut) or weapons, but audible gasps will not be out of place.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 27, 2007

Sly, subtle and very French psychological drama.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 27, 2007

If you don't take anything Andre says seriously, there is a wicked sense of fun about it, and you may even see a little of yourself in one of the characters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 27, 2007

The movie seems an act of score-settling by someone who got singed by a critic. Fair enough, and Andr's deviousness makes the film slyly credible, too.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 27, 2007

Has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 27, 2007

Four university students band together under the obnoxious mentorship of Andre, who is meant to be brilliant but, to me at least, seemed all too obviously a poseur. His betrayal of his friends deepens the movie.

| Original Score: B | Apr 26, 2007

Promoted as an intellectual suspense thriller, Emmanuel Bourdieu's second feature film is a chilling plunge into the dark pools of group think and a scalding examination of the vulnerability of the unformed identity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 26, 2007

The movie is largely unclassifiable -- at once a psychological study, an exceedingly dry comedy, and a moral tale in which stories are purloined and frauds perpetrated.

Full Review | Apr 24, 2007

A solid script, but it's really the performance by Vinon that's likely to leave a lasting impression on the viewer.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 24, 2007

Art-house fans young and old will revel in the film's evocation of urban student life and certain archetypes -- good and ornery -- who grace or despoil the groves of academe.

| Apr 23, 2007

Andr's character, even in the depths of his humiliation, remains remarkably dignified and non-self-pitying. That gives this academic melodrama an unexpected depth.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2007