The Family mishandles almost every attempt at humor and tries to make a lovable, “Tony Soprano Lite” character out of Giovanni, except the paterfamilias is far too mean-spirited to win us over.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 23, 2022

The stakes in this film are completely backwards.

| Feb 24, 2021

The tone shifts drastically from comedy to drama to action, while wasting character development on asinine subplots.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Dec 3, 2020

Flirts with the idea of being an actual dark comedy.

| Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 7, 2020

Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro... make the holes and troubles in the script forgivable.

| Jul 31, 2019

This is a movie that just doesn't click, despite the best efforts of the cast and writer/director Luc Besson.

| Apr 9, 2019

The Family casts the acting Goliath as a now all-too-familiar caricature of the parts that made his name. The result is a movie peppered with slapstick violence that plays at such a pitch as to nullify any of its possible potential.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 6, 2019

Whatever it is, this movie doesn't have it. In fact there is only one word I can think of to describe it: unredeemable.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Nov 6, 2018

While it has its highlights, The Family limits our frame of reference to other movies, rather than anything resembling real life.

| Aug 8, 2017

Those excited for the return of Besson to the action-comedy game likely will come away disappointed from this jumbled, visually bland effort.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 14, 2016

Full of tone deaf humor and gratuitous violence, The Family marks a miscalculated step for an otherwise fine filmmaker.

| Original Score: D+ | Jun 27, 2016

As cinema, it's an interesting experiment. As a movie, it's a bloody mess.

| Original Score: 2 of 5 | Apr 18, 2016

For anyone willing to brave some tonal inconsistencies, its rewards are real.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 10, 2016

The movie is a curious mess, but the cast is having a grand old time.

Full Review | Apr 28, 2015

De Niro's deadpan humour suits a garden burial perfectly, but we just don't see enough of how we really want him to be.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 10, 2014

Features a contender for worst subplot of the year.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 10, 2014

A terrible waste of many wonderful talents in front of and behind the camera.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 15, 2014

Could've been an inoffensive enough 90 minute feature, but the film insists on garbling the narrative with useless subplots that...bloat the movie beyond the breaking point.

| Original Score: C- | Feb 20, 2014

It rattles along at a slick pace and the closing sequence is everything you could want from a closing crescendo.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 6, 2014

American family, presumed obnoxious by French villagers, deals with problems by being obnoxiously, smugly violent. The daughter, when not beating people up, is a moist-eyed virgin eroticized by the camera, all her romantic aspirations cringingly mawkish.

| Dec 27, 2013