A Very Long Engagement

This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.Read Full Review »

In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."Read Full Review »

The holiday season's best movie so far.Read Full Review »

Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.Read Full Review »

An emotional powerhouse.Read Full Review »

Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.Read Full Review »

A long movie that almost wears out its 21/4-hour welcome, yet it's full of surprises.Read Full Review »

Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.Read Full Review »

A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.Read Full Review »

The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.Read Full Review »