[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

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

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

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

Has little to say about friendship other than that it's sometimes maintained by less-than-kind motives and reciprocated with equal coldness.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 2, 2006

Pic is deft, entertaining and, in its reverence for name-dropping scholarship and the paths by which the chosen few make a name for themselves, thoroughly Parisian.

Full Review | May 20, 2006

Student friendships, success and failure make for absorbing entertainment.

Full Review | May 20, 2006