Paris 2008

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Writer-director Klapisch's glossy love letter to Paris, and its yearning, beautifully lighted inhabitants, may not be much, and you may not even believe in its emotional and (discreet) carnal complications moment to moment. But the cast is fabulous. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: Mr. Klapisch's special gift is to populate his films with perfectly grounded eccentrics who use perfectly ordinary words to express poetic ideas. Read more

John Hartl, Seattle Times: A pretty travelogue about mortality, Paris never quite lives up to what turns out to be a presumptuous title. Read more

Nathan Rabin, AV Club: Agreeable but highly forgettable. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: If Paris feels like an Altman film in structure, it lacks the late filmmaker's bite, not to mention his genuine curiosity about human beings. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Soggy stuff from French director Cedric Klapisch. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: When it comes to being a fool for love, there are no city limits. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: The French director Cedric Klapisch is a glib wizard at weaving folks together, but there are too many secondhand characters roving through Paris, his latest ensemble piece. Read more

Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times: From the catacombs to the city's heights, Paris turns an unblinking gaze on the beauty of melancholy and the daring leap toward joy. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Paris when it fizzles -- which is most of the time -- is a dismal series of character portraits about a cross-section of Parisians mulling turning points in their lives. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Perhaps it's time for a moratorium on movies where the trajectories of various people intersect, often portentously, across the tableau of a big city. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: Paris keeps us involved not because of momentous plot developments but because the production incites our curiosity to see what will happen next. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Every character has life and depth. It's unusual for an episodic film to involve us so well in individual lives; as the narrative circles through their stories, we're genuinely curious about what will happen next. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Klapisch captures the bittersweet quality of those human contacts that seem to hold promise, but life goes by too fast for them to take root. Read more

David Fear, Time Out: This could have been a true urban mosaic. Instead, we simply get a vision of Paris as the city of lite. Read more

Tom Huddleston, Time Out: Perhaps the film's key problem is the feeling that Klapisch lets his ambition obstruct his storytelling. Read more

Leslie Felperin, Variety: Auds who like upmarket soap opera, sightseeing and Gallic films where people talk a lot about their relationships will be consistently entertained. Read more

Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice: At a 124-minute runtime, though, the writer-director has stretched a wide canvas, and only sporadically found anything worth filling it with. Read more