De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté 2005

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune: A French film that takes the hard-boiled poetics of American noir and squeezes them into an explosive, compacted knot of anguish and violence. Read more

John Hartl, Seattle Times: Emotionally richer than Fingers, and there's nothing secondhand about Duris' performance. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Beat is shot elegantly, and it's entertaining throughout, though in the end one might well ask what does it all mean? Read more

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: It's a tense, jumpy, sometimes amusing work that posits the inherent duality of everything. And, most definitely, the intriguing duality of people. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: From its plot to its look, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is designed to express how it feels to be torn between two opposing worlds and passions. Read more

Bill Muller, Arizona Republic: None of this would work without Duris' simmering performance as Tom, a person who's struggling to find his true calling. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: A blistering film you feel in the pit of your stomach, a jumpy, edgy piece of work that thrusts us into a personal maelstrom so tortured and intense, the emotions could be spread with a knife. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: Niels Arestrup is striking as the hero's slumlord father. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: The Beat That My Heart Skipped lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of Fingers, yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there. Read more

Dallas Morning News: Read more

Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly: If Audiard's film is less relentless and, ultimately, more hopeful than Toback's [Fingers], it is no less compelling a study of the attempt to harmonize seemingly dissonant forces -- tenderness and brutality, classicism and modernity, France and Vietnam. Read more

Gene Seymour, Newsday: Even if it weren't a fascinating thriller in its own right, The Beat That My Heart Skipped would deserve attention for being one of the few remakes that honors its source by paring down instead of adding on. Read more

Lisa Rose, Newark Star-Ledger: A mess of pretense, too hip and cool to concern itself with emotional logic or narrative cohesion. Read more

Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: Like most adaptations, Jacques Audiard's Parisian update of James Toback's brilliant 1978 Fingers will have fans of the original wishing it had been left alone. Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Superb remake [of James Toback's Fingers]. Read more

Andrew Sarris, New York Observer: The conceit of a strongarm hoodlum doubling as a concert pianist seemed really silly to me back in 1978, and it seems no less silly today. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: This is character-driven film noir, where the violence serves a higher purpose than shocking or titillating an audience. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: The Beat That My Heart Skipped doesn't replace Fingers, but joins it as the portrait of a man reaching out desperately toward his dying ideals. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a distinctly modern picture with its heart in the '70s: It has the nervous, kinetic energy, and the swaggering pioneer spirit, that marked '70s American filmmaking. Read more

Eddie Cockrell, Variety: A cocky French remake of James Toback's 1978 cult underworld character study Fingers that stands reasonably well on its own as an urgent, updated genre meditation on nurture vs. nature. Read more

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice: Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no Fingers. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: The Beat That My Heart Skipped, in which Audiard has tightened the story while opening it up, works precisely where Fingers failed. Read more