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Les amitiés maléfiques
Metascore
75 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 14 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 13 out of 14
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 14
  3. Negative: 0 out of 14
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  1. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    91
    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.
  2. Variety
    Reviewed by: Lisa Nesselson
    90
    A movie so unrepentantly French that viewers who enjoy truly Gallic pics can start (tastefully) salivating now.
  3. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    80
    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.
  4. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    80
    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.
  5. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Thomas
    80
    Steeped in shrewdness about the often contradictory workings of human nature, Poison Friends is gratifying in the best tradition of French cinema.
  6. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    75
    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.
  7. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    75
    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.
  8. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    75
    Poison Friends deftly sketches the fine line - is there one? - between "critic" and "loser."
  9. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    75
    This sly, subtle and very French psychological drama dissects the relationship between three insecure Sorbonne students and their deeply flawed idol.
  10. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Noel Murray
    75
    Up to the last five minutes, Poison Friends stays true to that heady, idealistic-to-a-fault world of academia.
  11. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    75
    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.
  12. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    70
    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.
  13. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    70
    A biting academic fable about the importance of aggression over intellect.
  14. The New Republic
    Reviewed by: Stanley Kauffmann
    60
    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.
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