Chicken with Plums Reviews
Las Vegas CityLife
unfurls in a dazzling set of sequences and montages that demonstrates everything shown to us - like marriage and society itself - may not be as it seems, or what it should have been.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
indieWIRE
While visually scrumptious, the movie struggles to reach a greater profundity that it never quite obtains, but its childlike emulation of a grand tragedy is indelibly precious.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
TV Guide's Movie Guide
On a scene-by-scene basis, much of Chicken With Plums delivers satisfactorily, but it adds up to much less than the sum of its many parts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Playlist
There are pleasures to be found in Chicken with Plums to be certain, but we'd hope for something a little more satisfying next time out from the directing team.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Scene-Stealers.com
...an admirable trip down the rabbit hole of a lonely man's mind and inspiration, but it loses its way about halfway through the movie and feels like a series of inspired, lovely short films, held together by the barest of threads.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Cinemalogue.com
... uneven blend of whimsy and surrealism that's visually compelling but narratively flat.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Resurrects the spirit of Middle Eastern fables, albeit with a French twist.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Salt Lake Tribune
[Amalric] anchors Satrapi and Paronnaud's magical visual range and an emotional journey that zips from ecstasy to tragedy and back again.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Charlotte Observer
Satrapi and Parronnaud give us clues but no solution. The fun, for those of us who like fairy tales, is in guessing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN)
Directors Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi use various cinematic tricks to examine their protagonist and his life. Voice-over narration, animation and music are a few of the options with which they compose their narration.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Top CriticThis dreamy, visually inventive Iranian drama functions on so many levels of reality and obsession that it almost ceases to entertain.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Oregonian
It's fascinating as an offbeat storytelling exercise.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Austin Chronicle
Fluctuating between the extraordinary and the dull, with sections of narrative explication and tangents, Chicken With Plums can be as frustrating as it is ambitious. It's more like Chicken With Plums -- and the Kitchen Sink.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
East Bay Express
There are a few writing problems and the melancholy mood weighs heavily, but Amalric's performance remains the film's rallying point.
Chicken is a movie that begins with a crescendo and doesn't sustain its lyricism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Predictability" is not in Satrapi and Paronnaud's vocabulary, and that is no small thing in this or any other movie era. But the whole those parts form never exceeds their sum.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Chicken With Plums" is a whimsical, sad, diverting and altogether delightful exploration of how cinema can benefit, not only from glancing back at its own past, but by staying open to parallel forms of presentation and play.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This highly stylized, often beautiful rumination on life and art and the choices we make just sort of lies there, waiting to expire.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
