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100A steady undertow of sex gives this French thriller a scintillating surface.
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100A witty, frightening, well-acted picture with near-perfect cinematic timing.
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91A suspenseful and delightfully creepy French drama.
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90Moll, in only his second feature, evokes a sense of foreboding, playing the routine against the unnerving, the humorous against the sinister, with a wit and deftness that might have impressed Hitchcock.
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90A strange and funny film, smart, complex and difficult to shake.
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90A deliciously mordant French spine-tingler.
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88The actors and writing lend unexpected dimension to all of the characters, and Lopez's Harry is an indelible antagonist, one who manages to be genuinely big-hearted and evil.
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88Moll clearly has looked to Hitchcock and Clouzot for inspiration. There are sexual undercurrents between characters, psychological quirks and a murky veneer like the surface of the pool in "Diabolique."
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83From Harry's perspective, it's a grotesque life, a dead end for his new protege Michel, but Moll also shows the sensitivity beneath the sniping and that's where With a Friend Like Harry ... really scores
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80Rises instantly above its genre merely by taking the time to develop its characters and scenario.
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80Moll ratchets his suspense with impressive mastery, wringing a maximum of excruciating terror out of the humblest everyday materials.
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80An insistent, insinuating film -- both in terms of its plot and characters, and in its impact on the viewer -- Harry's effects are small-scale but so perfectly pitched that they never seem small.
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80This criminal comedy remains deliciously deadpan about the wages of psychopathy.
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80Very, very funny, in that morbid sort of way that makes you laugh even as you shudder with horror.
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80This is a highly original film blessed with fetching complications all its own and some hair-raising turns of plot.
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78Appropriately belongs to Lopez. His mannequin glaze and never-wavering smile provide more creepy-crawlies than a thousand quivering violins or perfectly timed thunderclaps.
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75We realize that the most frightening outcome of the movie would be if it contained no surprises, no revelations, no quirky twist at the end.
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75A startling, suspenseful ride few will forget in a hurry.
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75Often darkly funny and very well acted, it's a pleasingly subtle, Hitchockian thriller with dark comic overtones.
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75The film is a small and polished gem that proves that with a friend like Harry, nobody needs an enemy.
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75Director Dominik Moll knows how to make a gruesome-free thriller and even manages some dark laughs as he turns the screws.
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75A sleek little poison pill of a movie.
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70Fans of the genre are in for a wickedly entertaining treat.
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70I did enjoy the movie's mercurial moods -- anxiety, terror, whimsical horror -- and I welcomed its confirmation that the work of the devil includes SUVs.
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63Critically lacks Highsmith's sixth sense for drawing you into the heart and soul of sociopaths, then jolting you with the realization that things are much worse even than they seem.
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Almost too clever for its own good.
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50Moll's style is low-key and straightforward.
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40As murderous amusements go, the film is mildly diverting, but it's like a faint facsimile of a Claude Chabrol film.