The Big Picture(L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie)

Slant Magazine by

Like its protagonist, the film sells out for the security of convention and complacency.

Time Out by David Fear

The Big Picture is really Duris's picture; the actor toggles effortlessly between arrogant, feral, remorseful and ruthless as the plot throws one curveball after the next.

Empire by David Parkinson

A few plot holes hold back what is otherwise a well cast and compelling picture.

New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme

Much of the plot stretches credulity, but the way it's constructed keeps tension high.

NPR by Mark Jenkins

The Big Picture has been compared to "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the twice-filmed Patricia Highsmith novel about a sociopath who kills and then impersonates a rich acquaintance. But in spirit it's closer to Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 "The Passenger," with Jack Nicholson as an existential adventurer who poses as a dead stranger.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The direction from Eric Lartigau keeps things moving along fast and furious: preposterous it may be, the movie is carried off with some style.

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.

Total Film by Tom Dawson

Built around a multilayered performance from Duris, it's a film unafraid to pose more questions than it answers.