5/5 Jazzy French Film
  by Eric M. Eiserloh (San Rafael, California)
This one is not for everyone. Most people will probably not only have trouble with its length, but its style, as well. Both as wild as it is imaginative, Christmas Tale is like a post-modern jazz score, mixing elements from a variety of cinematic styles that are jarring (at times), but always interesting to behold. As long as the film is, it always keeps moving and changing before our very eyes. What makes its odd stylistic combinations work is the compelling depths of its explorations into family and the bonds the unite, or divide us. Like and The Royal Tennenbaums, with a nouvelle vague twist, the film is not only full of odd combinations of image and music, but seems to jump from one film to another from scene to scene, as if each character or emotional quality (from light comedy to serious drama) were each receiving its own rendering. At times, the characters turn and speak directly to the camera. The filmmaker also intercedes by providing chapter headings and keyhole views, but, somehow, what could have become a cacophony of chaos, turns into a wonderment of cinema that any real cinephile will be amazed to behold and want to experience again....

5/5 Extraordinary, mult-layered film
  by Frederick A. Levy (Newport News, VA, United States)
French director Arnaud Desplechin's film works as one of the best mult-layered movies of the genre, which in many respects takes its conventions and turns them on their head. Not your feel good, holiday coming home movie but one which inverts and mischievously perverts viewer expectations and instead dares to substitute real people for the usual suspects. The first rate acting (the legendary Catherine Deneuve and the not as well known but no less talented Desplechin actors Mathieu Almaric and Emmanuelle Devos) takes a conventional genre situation - mother (Denueve) suffers from cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant - and explores the generational conflicts that afflict this family and provocatively and evocatively deals with the issues of mother love; forgiveness; sibling rivalry; grief for thwarted dreams and life changing losses, and even fidelity itself. For film lovers who enjoy characters in unconventional situations, this film will continue to reward upon future viewings. Those requiring conventional Hollywood plotting and endings should probably look elsewhere. I would add that the director is one of the best working today. One of the best films of 2008.

4/5 A Winter Night's Dream
  by Liam Wilshire (Portland, OR)
[4.5 stars] It may be a mistake to call this a "dysfunctional family Christmas movie." The individuals of the Vuillard family have, in fact, all submitted themselves to the precise roles that will allow the family to function. And that is the real problem. Each has to contort himself, at times almost beyond human recognition, in order for things to make a certain sort of sense. There is distance in how they address each other: no "maman", no "papa", just first names all around. The system that allows this family to function even includes "Anatole," an imaginary wolf that lives in the basement. It is a well-honed system.

The mother, father, three siblings, assorted cousins and spouses that populate this family tree all have a psychic tie to a withered root, namely the firstborn son, Joseph, who died of a rare cancer at age six. Elizabeth, the oldest surviving child, complains of a grief that has no apparent source. She is the type of person we all have met at some time in our lives, someone whose main grievance is that she feels herself to be inadequately aggrieved. She completely surrenders herself to the false martyrdom of self-pity, willingly clutching each grudge to her bosom, even as it drains her of life and poisons everyone around her.

We see how Henri, the middle child, becomes Elizabeth's chosen victim, and Ivan, the youngest, tries to mollify everyone. All of this has a decidedly theatrical effect. The family members are depicted as performers just as much as the Ekdahls are in Fanny and Alexander (Special Edition Five-Disc Set) - Criterion Collection, with whose first 90 minutes A CHRISTMAS TALE bears more than a passing resemblance. This masquerade also has, as a point of reference, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, both in the brief appearance of the 1935 movie on the TV screen, and in Mendelssohn's incidental music, playing on the soundtrack.

The directorial style of this film is something all its own. It uses film grammar from every era of cinema history, throwing it all into one big pot. Somehow it works. I kept thinking of Harold Bloom's assertion that "strangeness" is the quality that distinguishes lasting works of art. There is the strangeness that so assimilates us that we no longer see it as strange: Shakespeare, Griffith, Hitchcock. And there is the strangeness that cannot be assimilated: Sterne, Beckett, Buñuel.

A CHRISTMAS TALE possesses the latter variety of strangeness. You're not going to pull this out and watch it every holiday season. But you may choose to see it repeatedly for the fascinating, dreamlike dance in the interaction of its characters.

2/5 Should have learned my lesson with 'Kings and Queen'
  by Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX)
I'll take a flyer on many French movies - you never know when you'll run across a delight like Monsieur Ibrahim or I've Loved You So Long, or outright, blow-you-away classics like Read My Lips. Unfortunately, 'A Christmas Tale' falls into neither of those categories. I should have known better: writer/director Arnaud Desplechin was responsible for 2004's Kings & Queen. Six years on, all I remember from that movie were its annoyances: an unedited mess, its 2 hour 30 minute sprawl was too long by at least 45 minutes; apropos of nothing, characters suddenly address the screen with three-minute plus, nonsensical soliloquies; a story that hopscotches all over the place and simply causes you to give up any hope of following it; self-absorbed, miserable characters (literally no one is happy in either of these movies); and directorial trickery that only serves to distract.

All that is on display here once again. Against all odds, this outing is even longer than its never-ending predecessor. No one possesses the guts to tell Desplechin enough is enough. The bloat factor reaches its apex during an address-the-camera stem-winder from the usually-likable-but-here-detestable Mathieu Amalric. It's about five minutes of sheer, pseudo-babble. There are dinner table scenes in which no one talks to each other. Not only do these characters not like each other, they hate themselves. And Christmas only serves to bring this intense self-loathing to a head. Give me good, old-fashioned self-loathing in public places like Anne Hathaway's brilliant unwatchable-train-wreck-but-I'll-peek-through-my-fingers-anyway-because-this-is-so-good rehearsal dinner outburst in Rachel Getting Married. There's nothing about this movie that a little Jonathan Demme couldn't have solved.

About the only thing commendable here: getting to see Emmanuelle Devos' beguiling face again. As in 'Kings and Queen,' she's the best thing going in it. Then again, if you want the best of Ms. Devos, it's Read My Lips that needs to go on the top of your queue.

4/5 Not your usual Christmas story
  by Victoria Telford (Pfafftown, NC United States)
Wonderfully acted dark tale of family strife and the different dynamics that bring joy and pain. Catherine Deneuve is stellar in her performance as the matriarch of this dysfunctional group.