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Page Turner, The
Tartan USA

Page Turner, The reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 67 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
9.0 out of 10
based on 16 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 6 votes
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Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Catherine Frot, Déborah François, Pascal Greggory, Xavier De Guillebon, Christine Citti, Clotilde Mollet, Jacques Bonnaffé, and Antoine Martynciow

When a ten-year-old girl fails the Conservatory entrance exam, she gives up on the piano. Ten years later she encounters the woman who she believes ruined her career and patiently waits for revenge.


GENRE(S): Drama  |  Foreign  
WRITTEN BY: Denis Dercourt
Jacques Sotty
 
DIRECTED BY: Denis Dercourt  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: July 10, 2007 
Theatrical: March 23, 2007 
RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: France 
LANGUAGE(S): French (with English subtitles) 

Original title "La Tourneuse de Pages"

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

88
TV Guide Ken Fox
The film flows like a sinister and unsettling piece of music, from gripping overture to the tightly orchestrated movements to the unforgettable coda.
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88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Kamal AL-Solaylee
The secret of the film's success is performance, performance, performance.
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83
The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
A little too neat, and self-consciously vague at the end. But it's fascinating to observe and try to interpret François' mysterious smile as she eyes her boss.
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75
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Director and co-writer Denis Dercourt infuses Melanie's calculating seduction of the family with a sense of genuine menace. You will not be bored.
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75
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Dercourt, a very fine filmmaker, is a musician himself, a music teacher and one-time solo viola player with the French Symphony Orchestra. And he directs, with a musician's precision and an insider's sly wit, the world of classical music performance.
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70
Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Though this film is as formal and predetermined as a carved palace of ice, it builds interest through the strong performances of its pair of costars, the veteran Catherine Frot and relative newcomer Deborah Francois.
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70
Washington Post Stephen Hunter
What The Page Turner lacks in scale and ambition, it makes up for in precision. It's a small French delicacy, tart, acerbic and cynical, that focuses on three or four characters and yet manages to bring them and their dilemmas to vivid life.
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70
Variety Lisa Nesselson
Scripter-helmer Denis Dercourt's sixth feature is spare but classy, with an impressively controlled perf by Deborah Francois (the young mother in the Dardenne Bros.' "L'enfant") opposite popular and spot-on vet Catherine Frot.
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70
Village Voice Jim Ridley
Anyone who remembers "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" will see the instruments of revenge laid out like cutlery in a slasher movie's kitchen, and Dercourt's overbright visual scheme aims for a Michael Haneke–esque bourgeois chill that comes off instead as curiously bloodless.
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70
Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
It's a fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year.
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67
Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt
A revenge fantasy fit for a Seventies arthouse theatre: There are no knives or armies of kung-fu acrobats, no torture scenes involving rusty pliers; there's only a creeping malevolence quietly wreaking havoc on an otherwise normal bourgeois family.
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60
The New York Times Manohla Dargis
A would-be psychological thriller with next to no psychology and shivers instead of thrills, The Page Turner is a nervous-making, lightly amusing vengeance story that owes an obvious debt to Claude Chabrol.
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50
LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Though The Page Turner clearly aims for ambiguity of meaning, you'd have to be blind, or deaf to the strenuously long-faced score, to miss the signs and portents that keep piling up in this dispiritingly transparent movie, which brandishes its foregone conclusion 20 minutes in.
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50
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
This premise may sound all right on paper, but on-screen it doesn't really wash: if the girl had been half as committed to music as she now is to revenge, she would have overcome her disappointment.
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50
San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
A big fizzle.
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50
Boston Globe Michael Hardy
The stakes in this story seem too low to justify its audience’s attention. If The Page Turner were a novel, it would hardly be a page turner. Why should we hold films to a lower standard?
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What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Diana H. gave it a10:
Enticing and well-acted.

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