✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France · 2006
1h 40m
Director Emmanuel Bourdieu
Starring Malik Zidi, Thibault Vinçon, Alexandre Steiger, Thomas Blanchard
Genre Drama, Thriller
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While studying at the Sorbonne, graduate students Eloi and Alexandre fall under the spell of the charismatic André, adopting him as their intellectual leader in exchange for their loyalty to him. But when Andre's brilliance begins to crumble, his followers must decide whether they've changed for the better or for the worse.
We hate to say it, but we can't find anywhere to view this film.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
As a group portrait of apprentice intellectuals the film has an almost documentary accuracy. It also has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies.
Bourdieu's cast is terrific throughout. Any fellow academic brats out there will especially appreciate Jacques Bonnaffé, one of the greatest French comic actors, in an imperious turn as the severe, guru-like professor.
Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
If, unlike his friends, you don't take anything Andre says seriously, there is a wicked sense of fun about it, and you may even see a little of yourself in one of the characters.
Poison Friends deftly sketches the fine line - is there one? - between "critic" and "loser."
A movie so unrepentantly French that viewers who enjoy truly Gallic pics can start (tastefully) salivating now.
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
While the young people chatter about life and literature with sometimes overbearing self-satisfaction, the astute filmmaker observes their pretentious gum-flapping with a mixture of amusement, compassion, and wised-up rue.
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
This sly, subtle and very French psychological drama dissects the relationship between three insecure Sorbonne students and their deeply flawed idol.
Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer
Four university students band together under the obnoxious mentorship of Andre (Thibault Vinçon), who is meant to be brilliant but, to me at least, seemed all too obviously a poseur. His betrayal of his friends deepens the movie.
The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann
It is kept listenable--and watchable--because Bourdieu uses his knowledge of these people with winning ease. The story's conclusion verges on the grim, and it underscores Bourdieu's presumable theme: student life and talk are the last real vacations in many lives.
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