Reviews
The Scotsman
Alistair Harkness
"CLAUDE Chabrol returns with his most satisfying film for years: a pitch-black fusion of dark comedy, icy melodrama and satirical sideswipes at the class system, held together with an absorbing lead performance by Ludivine Sagnier."
22/05/2009
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Time Out
Wally Hammond
"Eschewing explicit moral condemnation in favour of a scabrous Buñuelian cool, humanised by a marvellously affecting central performance by Sagnier, and surrounded intriguingly by satellite performances which play riskily and amusingly with the edges of self-parody, this is one of Chabrol’s most elegant, acerbic and heartfelt entertainments in years."
21/05/2009
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"Though the performances are all first-rate, the film is let down by weak characterisation. Still, it’s enjoyable, if not exceptional."
24/05/2009
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Channel 4 Film
Anton Bitel
"...the second half delivers a series of satisfying pay-offs, as all the film's class conflicts, sexual tensions and competing truths quietly explode in a sequence of unsettling twists, deftly stage-managed by the master magician Chabrol. It is a chilling, austere affair in which viewers are cast as voyeuristic sensation-seekers baying for flesh and blood."
26/05/2009
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The Evening Standard
Charlotte O'Sullivan
"The big problem with Chabrol’s offering is its smart-alec script. Right at the start, our attention is brought to the source material, a turn of the century scandal involving womanizing architect Standford White, his current mistress and her husband, a news story that Chabrol claims “is more easily imaginable today than during the era in which it happened”."
22/05/2009
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The Daily Express
Allan Hunter
"Chabrol mines it for insights into class warfare and the modern fascination with celebrity but the relationships are never completely convincing and there are too many unresolved questions to create an entirely satisfying tale."
22/05/2009
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"It is a very French confection, and maybe you will need a rather sweet tooth for it. It is also essentially unserious, I think, a poised divertissement, without the dark power of Chabrol's great movies such as Les Bonnes Femmes. A bracing, amusing experience, nevertheless."
22/05/2009
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
"One keeps hoping that some of that sinister Chabrolian wit will enliven the film's smooth surface, but alas, it never does."
22/05/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Nicholas Barber
"...ridiculous..."
24/05/2009
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The Financial Times
Karl French
"Chabrol is, to put it charitably, bolder in The Girl Cut in Two and, by the time the story springs to life and becomes the thriller, of sorts, that it seems set up to be, we have had to sit through 90-odd minutes of turgid melodrama."
22/05/2009
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The Times
Ed Potton
"The performances drip with cliché, while the narrative is all over the place: plot developments are either clumsily telegraphed or given the flimsiest of dramatic explanation."
21/05/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
"...vexingly over-extended non-thriller..."
22/05/2009
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The Mirror
Mark Adams
"Heavy-handed French drama is a clumsy affair"
17/05/2009
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The Observer
Philip French
"For 50 years, the petit-bourgeois and the haut-bourgeois worlds of provincial France have been Claude Chabrol's happy stamping grounds and he stamps on them with varying degrees of subtlety. This new movie, one of his heavier efforts, is set in and around Lyon where the old money folk compete in the nastiness stakes with the nouveaux riches"
24/05/2009
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
"Most people won't care enough about these people or believe in their relationships to sit out all 115 minutes of this icily mannered film that continually hints at darker, more subversive themes of sado-masochism than it dares to explore. "
21/05/2009
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