5.0
Dave White Profile <h3>Dave White</h3> <p><strong>Your Movies.com Man at the Multiplex</strong></p> <br /> <p>Dave White's first movie review was of the animated feature Snoopy Come Home. He was seven years old...<a href="http://www.movies.com/movie-reviews/dave-white">Read full profile</a></p>
...sprawling, complex Read full review
Critics scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.
out of 100
Metascore®Universal acclaimbased on a weighted average of allcritic review scores.
What results is a captivating portrait of the most gorgeously fractious dysfunctional family.
Read Full Review
A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty -- marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche -- and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being.
The movie is enchanting.
Desplechin's films are great, chaotic, unsettling fun. This one's scored, elegantly, to a mixture of standards and classics and original music by Gregoire Hetzel.
Largely thanks to the snappy editing, short scenes and a strong cast led by a matronly Deveuve and Amalric's enjoyable perf as the black sheep of the family, A Christmas Tale never devolves into a tedious two-and-a-half hours of self-examination. But it also never goes very far, either.
Despite the name recognition of such actors as Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric, foreign audiences might be deterred by the movie's 143-minute length and the profusion of characters and interwoven story lines.
If feuds, drunken outbursts and thoughtless bed-hopping sound like fun, then A Christmas Tale is a hoot. Some wry humor runs through the course of the overly long saga. But there's not enough dark wit to mitigate the tedium and pretentiousness.
For long stretches A Christmas Tale seems to be going nowhere in particular and using a lot of dialogue to do so. These are not boring stretches. The movie is 151 minutes long and doesn't feel especially lengthy. The actors are individually good. They work together to feel like a family.
Density of detail and intensity of experience are the twin distinctions of A Christmas Tale, a long, improbably funny and very beautiful film.
See all A Christmas Tale reviews at Metacritic.com