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How I Killed My Father(Comment j'ai tué mon père)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Spain, France · 2001
1h 38m
Director Anne Fontaine
Starring Michel Bouquet, Charles Berling, Natacha Régnier, Amira Casar
Genre Drama

Jean-Luc enjoys a comfortable life with his wife, Isa. He is shocked to learn that his father, Maurice, who had abandoned the family years earlier, has died in Africa -- and is even more shocked when Maurice shows up a short time later at his house. Without explanation, Maurice insinuates himself into his son's life, charming Isa but bringing Jean-Luc's buried resentment to the surface. Will he ever be able to forget and forgive?

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What are critics saying?

40

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

A kind of murder mystery, but eventually the only victim is the audience's interest -- the picture is uncompromising and inauspicious.

100

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

The most disturbing and effective thriller I've seen in many moons. Rarely, indeed almost never, is such high-wattage brainpower coupled with pitch-perfect acting and an exquisite, unfakable sense of cinema.

40

Village Voice by Dennis Lim

A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.

90

L.A. Weekly by John Patterson

The result is an intelligent, moving and invigorating film, just the thing for adults bored with the shock-horror posturing to be found in the work of so many young European directors.

80

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

Fontaine gives her film the tone of a psychological thriller, with the potential of violence always lurking beneath the surface.

80

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Fontaine's thoughtful character-driven screenplay is the perfect vehicle for Berling and Bouquet and both are superb. As father and son, they play off each another in fascinating ways as the film moves towards its perfectly modulated, intriguingly ambiguous final moment.

91

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The script is a steady accretion of small stabs to the heart, propelling the gorgeous performances of Berling, Regnier, and especially the 76-year-old French cinema veteran Bouquet, whose every faint smile is killing.

88

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Not about murder in the literal sense, although that seems a possibility. It is about a man who would like to kill his father, and who may have been killed spiritually by his father.

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