Poison Friends (Les Amities malefiques) Reviews

A much too tidy insightful clinical tale about students dealing with academic life and the pains of growing up.

Full Review | Original Score: B-

There are some schematics at work in the screenplay, but the film proves to be an entertaining, if frustrating, experience.

Full Review | Original Score: B

This clever little film explodes conceptions and presents a good argument for the ends justifying the means.

Full Review | Original Score: B

The dialogue in "Poison Friends" is clever and erudite, but underneath the lit-crit the film has the atmosphere of a Hitchcockian thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Poison Friends is at once a sly satire on the pretensions and aspirations of academia and an intellectual suspense-thriller that builds and builds but never loses credibility.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

While the young people chatter about life and literature with sometimes overbearing self-satisfaction, the astute filmmaker observes their pretentious gum-flapping with a mixture of amusement, compassion, and wised-up rue.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

In this observant psychological drama with the energy of a thriller, there's no blood (except for maybe a paper cut) or weapons, but audible gasps will not be out of place.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Sly, subtle and very French psychological drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

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.

| Original Score: 4/5

Four university students band together under the obnoxious mentorship of Andre, who is meant to be brilliant but, to me at least, seemed all too obviously a poseur. His betrayal of his friends deepens the movie.

Full Review | Original Score: B

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

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.

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A solid script, but it's really the performance by Vinçon that's likely to leave a lasting impression on the viewer.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10

Art-house fans young and old will revel in the film's evocation of urban student life and certain archetypes -- good and ornery -- who grace or despoil the groves of academe.

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André's character, even in the depths of his humiliation, remains remarkably dignified and non-self-pitying. That gives this academic melodrama an unexpected depth.

A cerebral film nicely demonstrating what happens when insecure students follow a magnetic leader who turns out to be a liar.

Full Review | Original Score: B

A richly developed French film about university life, power, deceit and mentoring that presents quite a moral wallop.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

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