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indiewire.com - 11/11/2008

REVIEW | You Can Go Home Again: Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale"

— indiewire.com — by Leo Goldsmith (November 11, 2008) [An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot .] Though it often seems the nadir of schmaltz and sentimentality, the Hollywood Christmas movie has always been a bit bipolar. From " A Christmas Story " to " Gremlins ," " National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation " ... (more) REVIEW | You Can Go Home Again: Arnaud Desplechin's "A ...

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A Christmas Tale

Four Christmases

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theeveningclass.blogspot.com - 11/8/2008

A CHRISTMAS TALE—The Evening Class Interview With Arnaud Desplechin

— theeveningclass.blogspot.com — Like a bottle of champagne, Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale christened the launch of the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series early last month. Desplechin flew in from France to take part in the festivities and earlier in the ... (more) A CHRISTMAS TALE—The Evening Class Interview With Arnaud ...

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ew.com - 11/14/2008

A Christmas Tale | Movie Review | Entertainment Weekly

— ew.com — A fractious family of arbitrarily colorful characters, home for the holidays and acting nutty, is a movie notion as traditional as a regifted fruitcake, and often enough as inedible. Yet out of the most ordinary ingredients — an ailing mother, ... (more) A Christmas Tale | Movie Review | Entertainment Weekly

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A Christmas Tale

Catherine Deneuve

Queen Latifah

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A Christmas Tale.
GreenCine Daily — "Arnaud Desplechin is a cinema maximalist," writes J Hoberman in the Voice: "A Christmas Tale feels like all 12 days of seasonal merriment, and then some. This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama, shown last month in the New York Film Festival, is a heady plum pudding of a movie - studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible." "Mercurial, multifarious, and burgeoning with detail, A Christmas Tale builds upon the manic catharses of ...

Critic wrangle: "A Christmas Tale."
IFC.com - Indie Eye — ... at the Onion AV Club, "It's the definition of a film meant to be admired more than loved, but Desplechin's fierce intelligence and uncompromising sense of character come through," while J. Hoberman at the Village Voice declares that Desplechin has "invented a form of domestic magic realism," and uses the opportunity to deflate two of the year's other critical darlings, "Rachel Getting Marries" and "Synecdoche, New York": "one hopes that they haven't sucked the critical oxygen out of the atmosphere or overdrawn all available superlatives from the dictionary." ...

A Christmas Tale. A house is an outfit. [part one]
VINYL IS HEAVY — ... The house is the cinema, too, we gather. It holds histories and stages opportunities for new life, and new love, all kinds of desires and passions. Desplechin's cinema revels in these possibilities. Hoberman writes: "Expansive but cozy, convoluted yet circular, at once avant and retro, and contradictory down to its last scene, the movie ends with a new myth—if not a new cosmology—articulated by the writer Elizabeth." It's easy to point to the quotes in a Desplechin film (they abound) but it's often harder to secure their significance, much less their relevance, in tidy ...