Le Petit Lieutenant Reviews
A quiet powerhouse of a film, an implacable, uncompromising French police drama, both old-fashioned and modern, that underlines the reasons impeccably made crime stories do so well on-screen.
Le Petit Lieutenant shows how good French movies can be when they stay French and don't try to go international.
... you can sense Baye's struggling within the limits imposed on her.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The film's plot, revolving around a murder investigation that turns nasty, ticks along smoothly and efficiently. But it's ultimately more of a character drama, and a reminder that great acting often has little to do with words.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Le Petit Lieutenant looks at Antoine's life with lyricism.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Beauvois makes the milieu his own, too, showing us credible and affecting human beings caught up in a world that often reveals humanity at its worst.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The movie's realism is unimpeachable, though American cops might be stunned by the idea of a half-dozen detectives being assigned to the murder of an anonymous floater.
...More than any film in recent memory, Le Petit Lieutenant conveys the relentless toll of big-city police work.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Just as the French may overrate our cinema (Jerry Lewis, anyone?), we may overrate theirs. Take Le Petit Lieutenant -- please.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
[Xavier Beauvois] is a clean and sure director, with a good selective eye: he knows where we ought to be looking at any moment. We can hope for more Beauvois films with worlds of their own.
A quiet powerhouse of a film, an implacable, uncompromising French police drama, both old-fashioned and modern, that underlines the reasons impeccably made crime stories do so well on screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
When the action finally picks up in the pursuit of a ruthless Russian gang of killers, the relationship between Caroline and Antoine is delivered a devastating emotional wallop.
Le Petit Lieutenant is a flinty, almost hardhearted work about characters who have lost almost everything in pursuit of some undefinable abstraction, like honor or their country or doing the right thing.
New York Magazine
Top Critic... a bit too underplayed for its own good.
Le Petit Lieutenant, keeps such a lazy pace, with so many scenes that fail to move the story forward, that it should be cited for failing to meet the minimum speed for a crime drama.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The relationship between an enthusiastic young Paris homicide detective and his middle-age female supervisor is as important as the murders they are trying to solve in Xavier Beauvois' taut police procedural.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The results, while a bit overlong, are engaging and real.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The tough, satisfying French film Le Petit Lieutenant is an austere drama of the sort that rarely makes it to American screens except on cable television.
| Original Score: 4/5
In his fourth feature, director Xavier Beauvois turns a classic policier into an existential musing whose emotional impact quietly accumulates.
Nathalie Baye is remarkable in Le Petit Lieutenant where she plays Caroline Vaudieu, a Parisian police inspector who returns to her post after a bout with alcoholism following her child's death.
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| Original Score: A-
I won't give away the plot twist, except to say that the final minute of the movie is one of the most bleak, and moving, endings I've seen in years.
Tragedy, when it comes, does not involve us -- we're kept at arm's length through to the final retribution.
The Young Lieutenant seems so determined to reproduce the drudgery of police work, it's boring for the first hour, and only marginally more exciting for the second.
