80
New Times (L.A.) by Andy Klein
The film is a masterpiece of nuance and characterization, marred only by an inexplicable, utterly distracting blunder at the very end.
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80
The story proceeds, by minuscule tonal shifts and barely perceptible changes in the atmospheric temperature, from touches of ghoulish comedy -- to the creepy stillness of death that pervades the house.
90
Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.
75
New York Daily News by Jami Bernard
Not since Cary Grant offered Joan Fontaine a gleaming glass of milk has a bedtime toddy looked as suspicious as it does in Claude Chabrol's wittily enigmatic Merci pour le chocolat.
80
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Unfortunately, a conclusion stuffed with so many improbabilities that it left me gaping in disbelief. Prior to that, this is pretty much fun.
60
The film is ridiculously overplotted, and very little of the plot serves any purpose other than to motivate what you can pretty well guess is going to happen from the outset.
88
Like some of Hitchcock's films, the story - adapted from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong, an American mystery writer of the '40s and '50s - can be accused of stretching credibility and coincidence almost to the breaking point.
100
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
It is a movie about the gradual erosion of life's seeming certainties, and it's also about the destructive immorality that may lie beneath the most exquisitely composed veneer. As we watch "Chocolat," this great director and his great actress, Huppert, convince us: Evil is.
80
Occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder.
80
Chabrol handles the upended family dynamic beautifully until the final third, when a wildly implausible sequence of events lessens the suspense just as he should be turning the screws.