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100As stylish as it is suspenseful.
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100Brilliant, brutally poignant.
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100Unpretentiously fantastic.
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100What has resulted is a blistering film you feel in the pit of your stomach, a jumpy, edgy piece of work that thrusts us into a personal maelstrom so tortured and intense, the emotions could be spread with a knife.
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100Audiard's superb remake improves on the original significantly, investing it with aesthetic grandeur and emotional depth.
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90Audiard's take is fevered, immediate, and hopeful--a story of a man recovering his soul. The most intense and compelling sections of The Beat are almost word for word from "Fingers" (albeit translated into French), but this beat changes everything.
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90There are remakes and there are remakes. I don't want to belabor the flaws and sexual excesses of the original; its great strength was its explosive energy. Still, this one investigates the unfulfilled potential of the first one so thoroughly, and develops it so audaciously, that it qualifies as a brilliant reinvention.
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88It's a thriller that comes at you with gut-clutching ferocity, spewing blood and sex, shaking you up and scrambling your responses.
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88Beautifully shot, in long, fluid takes, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is that rare thing: a remake that improves on its source.
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88The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.
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83The Beat That My Heart Skipped lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of "Fingers," yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there.
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It's a film that, by its complexity of character and mastery of tone, surpasses the original it was intended to honor.
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80From the performances of its first rate cast to the infectious score and Audiard's deft direction, this is one of the most accomplished movies you'll see anytime soon-old, new or, as is the case here, combining the best of both.
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80Might not be as intriguingly odd as the picture that inspired it. But like that earlier picture, it bristles with life and energy. It's a movie made with equal measures of bravado and humility -- the same mix of qualities you need to play Beethoven, Mozart or Bach.
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80As tense and taut as any crime saga, but the stakes are more personal.
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80A character study, the film succeeds in large measure due to the kinetically charged performance of Romain Duris.
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80A nifty piece of work -- with, by the way, a fantastic musical score and soundtrack -- that, if there's any justice in the movie world, will eventually earn a mystique all its own.
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80Audiard's work is tense, vivid, and alert, and he's got the right actor as Tom, an irresistibly attractive guy who's pushing thirty yet has no more control over his impulses than a chaotic boy.
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80It's more than a simple improvement, inverting some of the original's qualities so that the impersonal, well-crafted filmmaking remains lucid throughout.
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75Doesn't replace "Fingers," but joins it as the portrait of a man reaching out desperately toward his dying ideals.
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Even when deadly silent, though, as he is through most of the film, Duris is brutally eloquent.
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75A good French film that was inspired by an American classic.
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70Beat has a moody, furtive quality that jibes perfectly with the perplexed life of a pianist-gangster.
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70Out of a borrowed and preposterous premise, Audiard has fashioned a film that is more haunting--and more compellingly watchable--than it has any right to be.
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60It lacks "Fingers" searing, explosive vitality.
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60Simmering study of a petty hood-cum-wannabe pianist succumbing to his innate violent side - but there might be a touch too much ivory tinkling for some.
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60Stands reasonably well on its own as an urgent, updated genre meditation on nurture vs. nature.
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60Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered.
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50The Beat That My Heart Skipped has nonetheless brought attention to a nearly lost classic. For more than two decades, "Fingers" was not available on video or DVD and was rarely screened. But it's available now, and if you've never seen it, put it on your must-rent list immediately.
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50The problem with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, as it was with "Fingers," is that the gravity of the character’s psychological divide is clear after the first half hour, and both films add little in the next hour to deepen our – or the characters’ – understanding or entanglement.
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50As it is, Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no "Fingers."
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30Contrivances accrue so thickly that the source seems to be not 1978 Toback, but 1930s Warner Brothers. The film sweats to be up-to-date with ultra-hectic editing, pace, elision, and sangfroid, but they can't verify the pasteboard base.