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91While the film is no groundbreaker, it is a paragon of elegance without austerity, and there's nothing like being in the confident hands of a master filmmaker.
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88Chabrol's final picture was designed with Depardieu in mind. It's a small work. Yet it's so pleasurably well-made, so obviously the work of major talents in a comfortable groove, why carp about the scale or ambition of the project?
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88Chabrol as always shows a tenderness toward the lives of people who are exceptional only because crime touches them.
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80The ease and professionalism that distinguished this prolific director's later work is very much in evidence, as is an insouciant attitude, at once resigned and dismissive, toward mortality.
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80Inspector Bellamy is dedicated to the memory of two famous Georges: the drily ironic singer Brassens, and Georges Simenon, whose crime novels go for the jugular of bourgeois France - and dig deep into the black hearts of those who, just when they imagine they have hit bottom, can always sink lower.
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80This final film -- after so many dazzling studies of adultery, such as "La Femme Infidele (1969) -- is a touching and unfashionable hymn to married love. [1 Nov. 2010, p.121]
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75Inspector Bellamy leaves a sense not unlike a summary of Chabrol's entire career -- of guilty stains seeping away in every direction, of motives hidden and of endless stories that frustrate full understanding. To Chabrol, no life is ever a closed case.
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70Depardieu brings such easygoing authority to the title character that you're pulled into the investigation, even as Bellamy becomes increasingly bewildered by his home life.
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70It's an ostensive crime film at once symmetrical, surprising, and knowingly cinephilic.
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Oct 26, 201070This upscale talkfest, which delights in its witty banter and sly references, could be helmer's most commercial work in quite some time.
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67Depardieu and Marie Bunel (as Bellamy's wife) have a terrific interplay, but Chabrol's sharp direction can't quite rescue his fuzzy script.
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63A dry and moody piece built on closely-observed characters, not on thrills or an unraveling plot.
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60That sense of mischief and pleasure in the craft makes Bellamy a thoroughly intriguing and likeable experience. From Chabrol we would expect nothing less.
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60Depardieu and Cornillac's sibling rivalry, which segues between mostly verbal smackdowns and liquored-up bursts of merriment, is beautifully observed, as is the relationship between the detective and his devoted wife (the wonderful Marie Bunel). The thriller stuff, by comparison, is just a lot of perfunctory deadweight.
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50Recently deceased master filmmaker Claude Chabrol's 50th and final feature, Inspector Bellamy, proves a sadly bland footnote to an illustrious and influential career.