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Poison Friends
Strand Releasing

Poison Friends reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 75 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
9.0 out of 10
based on 14 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 1 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Malik Zidi, Thibault Vinçon, Alexandre Steiger, Thomas Blanchard, Dominique Blanc, Natacha Régnier, and Jacques Bonnaffé

At the start of the new college semester, Eloi and Alexandre encounter André, the most brilliant student in the lecture hall. Fascinated by his ease and charisma, they quickly fall under his spell. André then offers them his friendship in exchange for complete loyalty to him. Lost in admiration, Eloi and Alexandre devotedly submit to this rigorous discipline – up until the day that André abandons them. Eloi and Alexandre now have no other choice than to stand on their own. (Strand Releasing)


GENRE(S): Drama  |  Foreign  
WRITTEN BY: Emmanuel Bourdieu
Marcia Romano
 
DIRECTED BY: Emmanuel Bourdieu  
RELEASE DATE: Theatrical: April 27, 2007 
RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: France 
LANGUAGE(S): French (with English subtitles) 

Original title "Les Amitiés Maléfiques"; Critics Week Grand Prize, Grand Golden Rail and SACD Screenwriting Award, 2006 Cannes Film Festival

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...

91
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
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.
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90
Variety Lisa Nesselson
A movie so unrepentantly French that viewers who enjoy truly Gallic pics can start (tastefully) salivating now.
Read Full Review
80
Village Voice J. Hoberman
Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.
Read Full Review
80
Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Steeped in shrewdness about the often contradictory workings of human nature, Poison Friends is gratifying in the best tradition of French cinema.
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80
Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Bourdieu's cast is terrific throughout. Any fellow academic brats out there will especially appreciate Jacques Bonnaffé, one of the greatest French comic actors, in an imperious turn as the severe, guru-like professor.
Read Full Review
75
The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
Up to the last five minutes, Poison Friends stays true to that heady, idealistic-to-a-fault world of academia.
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75
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing. Its characters and milieu are very well drawn, and Andre is one of the more intriguing and convincing fictional creations in recent film.
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75
Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Four university students band together under the obnoxious mentorship of Andre (Thibault Vinçon), 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.
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75
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
This sly, subtle and very French psychological drama dissects the relationship between three insecure Sorbonne students and their deeply flawed idol.
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75
New York Post Kyle Smith
Poison Friends deftly sketches the fine line - is there one? - between "critic" and "loser."
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75
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
If, unlike his friends, 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.
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70
The New York Times A.O. Scott
As a group portrait of apprentice intellectuals the film has an almost documentary accuracy. It also 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.
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70
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
A biting academic fable about the importance of aggression over intellect.
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60
The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
It is kept listenable--and watchable--because Bourdieu uses his knowledge of these people with winning ease. The story's conclusion verges on the grim, and it underscores Bourdieu's presumable theme: student life and talk are the last real vacations in many lives.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 1 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

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