Love Me If You Dare

ReelViews James Berardinelli

If you like romantic movies but find Hollywood's increasingly sterile formulas to be a poisonous bore, Love Me if You Dare offers an antidote.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Much of the style strains too hard to be cute, but true romantics may shed copious tears of sympathy and empathy.

Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder

It's a pitch-black, Grimm Brothers-style fable that enchants, frustrates and ultimately dares you to love it. Even if you don't, you'll be riveted.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

There's something in the obsessiveness of these characters that pushes the film just beyond the level of believability, even for a romantic fable such as this.

Film Threat Christopher Zinsli

The script offers up some deviously clever twists and dark laughs reminiscent of the over-maligned French (coincidence?) Stewart spite-a-thon, “Love Stinks,” only with a jaunty European twist.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

The rueful ghost of François Truffaut hovers over writer-director Yann Samuell's wonderfully capricious tale of Gallic lovers with no idea of when to say finis.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A perversely dark romantic comedy shot and edited in the contemporary fairy-tale style of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amélie." But this one has a dagger for a heart.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

French films have long specialized in depicting the impassioned, go-for-broke infatuation known as l'amour fou. Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare may be the first to investigate l'amour annoying.

Miami Herald Marta Barber

Unlike “Amélie,” Love Me If You Dare will not become a sleeper. But neither will it make you go to sleep.

The Hollywood Reporter Judith Prescott

Despite the sterling performances by the two main actors, the movie tends to lose pace in the second half and needs more secondary characters. But for a first time in the director's chair, Samuell shows a deftness of touch that bodes well for the future.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Gianni Truzzi

Once we realize just how deeply hateful these two are, Samuell's free-spirited, romping visuals start to feel imposed on the film as a shameless "me too" ripoff of another, better movie.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Doesn't even play fairly by its own rules. What emerges isn't a romantic comedy at all, but rather--very much like "The War of the Roses" a few years back--a cleverly disguised monster movie.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

It's a powerful psychological conceit, but Samuell subverts it at every turn with his carnivalesque style and canned Gallic wistfulness.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Perhaps because the film makes me feel so crawly, it is actually good. Yet still I cannot like it.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Apparently, the idea of their passion is enough to save them from a life of boredom - if only it had the same happy effect on us.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

Has to be one of the least charming French romances to find American distribution in recent years.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Slick but painfully precious, it strains to be darkly romantic but is bereft of genuine feeling.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Whether you find its dual resolution hopelessly pretentious or profound depends on your tolerance for a certain strain of Gallic sentimentality that takes itself more seriously than it lets on.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The award for the most annoying character to appear in a movie so far this year turns out to be a tie: It goes to both of the oh-so-swankly tormented romantic mischief makers of Love Me if You Dare.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

The film is loaded with striking visuals, high energy and all-stops portrayals from its actors, but for all of Samuell's imaginative cinematic bravura, it is, finally, mainly exasperating. Phooey on Julien and Sophie's excruciating l'amour fou.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

The film's attempts at meaning do it in. The longer it goes on and the darker it grows, the further it drifts from any kind of human experience, outside of its protagonists' particular flavor of madness.

Variety Lisa Nesselson

Valiant attempt to create a modern fairytale ends up being frustratingly creepy instead of haunting and memorable.

Village Voice David Ng

The movie's hyperactivity eventually yields to such revelations as Life Isn't a Game and The Biggest Dare Is Love, but the ultimate measure of its conventionality is its soundtrack.

TV Guide Ken Fox

It may be a simple matter of cultural dissonance, or maybe just a bad translation, but it's hard to see why this obnoxious romantic comedy about a lifetime-long relationship between two mischievous adults locked in an ongoing game of "Dares" was such a huge hit in its native France.

Empire Nick Dawson

An uncomfortable, if intriguing, mess.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Two of the most insistently unlikable movie creations to afflict audiences in some time, a pair of self-obsessed anti-romanticists who spend some two decades doing stupid things at each other's behest. They also whine a lot.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Mr. Samuell's stylistic revelries are meant as comments on the conventions and excesses of movie romance, but his approach is glib and self-congratulatory. No feelings dwell beneath the layers upon layers of faux-naïve artifice. I dare you to sit through this movie and not wish you were somewhere else.

Washington Post Mark Jenkins

It's a nasty piece of work about two nasty pieces of work.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

In this toxic tale of young psychopaths in love, the stylish, often stunning visuals are ultimately outmatched by the repellent protagonists at the story's center.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

Irritating throughout, Love Me if You Dare turns positively appalling in its last half hour, with the inevitable final showdown producing an image that continues to curdle my stomach days later.