Poison Friends (2007)

If you don't take anything Andre says seriously, there is a wicked sense of fun about it, and you may even see a little of yourself in one of the characters.

The movie seems an act of score-settling by someone who got singed by a critic. Fair enough, and André's deviousness makes the film slyly credible, too.

Has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies.

Promoted as an intellectual suspense thriller, Emmanuel Bourdieu's second feature film is a chilling plunge into the dark pools of group think and a scalding examination of the vulnerability of the unformed identity.

The movie is largely unclassifiable -- at once a psychological study, an exceedingly dry comedy, and a moral tale in which stories are purloined and frauds perpetrated.