De Battre mon Coeur s'est Arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) Reviews
Top CriticNiels Arestrup is striking as the hero's slumlord father.
None of this would work without Duris' simmering performance as Tom, a person who's struggling to find his true calling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Audiard has a nice stride here, establishing Tom's world and then altering it with slow insistence.
| Original Score: B
Audiard has wisely avoided the crime-movie clichés of Toback's Fingers, and if his film is not exactly naturalistic, it is steeped in a reality that makes it all the more compelling.
| Original Score: 3/4
Emotionally richer than Fingers, and there's nothing secondhand about Duris' performance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is character-driven film noir, where the violence serves a higher purpose than shocking or titillating an audience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Duris' performance is more finely tuned and less frenetic than Keitel's enjoyably over-the-top job, and the film's emotional chords resonate in more satisfying and complicated ways.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a tense, jumpy, sometimes amusing work that posits the inherent duality of everything. And, most definitely, the intriguing duality of people.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
A French movie that reclaims some of the urgency and breathless enthusiasm of the movies we loved in the '70s.
| Original Score: B+
The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The conceit of a strongarm hoodlum doubling as a concert pianist seemed really silly to me back in 1978, and it seems no less silly today.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped, in which Audiard has tightened the story while opening it up, works precisely where Fingers failed.
A French film that takes the hard-boiled poetics of American noir and squeezes them into an explosive, compacted knot of anguish and violence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped doesn't replace Fingers, but joins it as the portrait of a man reaching out desperately toward his dying ideals.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Beat is shot elegantly, and it's entertaining throughout, though in the end one might well ask what does it all mean?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a distinctly modern picture with its heart in the '70s: It has the nervous, kinetic energy, and the swaggering pioneer spirit, that marked '70s American filmmaking.
A blistering film you feel in the pit of your stomach, a jumpy, edgy piece of work that thrusts us into a personal maelstrom so tortured and intense, the emotions could be spread with a knife.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
A mess of pretense, too hip and cool to concern itself with emotional logic or narrative cohesion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
This stylish, tightly coiled character study has notions of turning into a thriller but never quite does.
| Original Score: 3/4
Like most adaptations, Jacques Audiard's Parisian update of James Toback's brilliant 1978 Fingers will have fans of the original wishing it had been left alone.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A cocky French remake of James Toback's 1978 cult underworld character study Fingers that stands reasonably well on its own as an urgent, updated genre meditation on nurture vs. nature.
Even if it weren't a fascinating thriller in its own right, The Beat That My Heart Skipped would deserve attention for being one of the few remakes that honors its source by paring down instead of adding on.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Beat That My Heart Skipped lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of Fingers, yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no Fingers.
Audiard could have made the romantic side of the movie more explicit, but reticence is part of his cool.
