| 88 |
TV Guide
The film flows like a sinister and unsettling piece of music, from gripping overture to the tightly orchestrated movements to the unforgettable coda.
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| 88 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Kamal AL-Solaylee
The secret of the film's success is performance, performance, performance.
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| 83 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
A little too neat, and self-consciously vague at the end. But it's fascinating to observe and try to interpret François' mysterious smile as she eyes her boss.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
Director and co-writer Denis Dercourt infuses Melanie's calculating seduction of the family with a sense of genuine menace. You will not be bored.
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| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
Dercourt, a very fine filmmaker, is a musician himself, a music teacher and one-time solo viola player with the French Symphony Orchestra. And he directs, with a musician's precision and an insider's sly wit, the world of classical music performance.
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| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
Though this film is as formal and predetermined as a carved palace of ice, it builds interest through the strong performances of its pair of costars, the veteran Catherine Frot and relative newcomer Deborah Francois.
|
| 70 |
Washington Post
What The Page Turner lacks in scale and ambition, it makes up for in precision. It's a small French delicacy, tart, acerbic and cynical, that focuses on three or four characters and yet manages to bring them and their dilemmas to vivid life.
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| 70 |
Variety
Scripter-helmer Denis Dercourt's sixth feature is spare but classy, with an impressively controlled perf by Deborah Francois (the young mother in the Dardenne Bros.' "L'enfant") opposite popular and spot-on vet Catherine Frot.
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| 70 |
Village Voice
Jim Ridley
Anyone who remembers "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" will see the instruments of revenge laid out like cutlery in a slasher movie's kitchen, and Dercourt's overbright visual scheme aims for a Michael Haneke–esque bourgeois chill that comes off instead as curiously bloodless.
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| 70 |
Salon.com
It's a fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year.
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| 67 |
Austin Chronicle
Josh Rosenblatt
A revenge fantasy fit for a Seventies arthouse theatre: There are no knives or armies of kung-fu acrobats, no torture scenes involving rusty pliers; there's only a creeping malevolence quietly wreaking havoc on an otherwise normal bourgeois family.
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| 60 |
The New York Times
A would-be psychological thriller with next to no psychology and shivers instead of thrills, The Page Turner is a nervous-making, lightly amusing vengeance story that owes an obvious debt to Claude Chabrol.
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| 50 |
LA Weekly
Though The Page Turner clearly aims for ambiguity of meaning, you'd have to be blind, or deaf to the strenuously long-faced score, to miss the signs and portents that keep piling up in this dispiritingly transparent movie, which brandishes its foregone conclusion 20 minutes in.
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| 50 |
Chicago Reader
This premise may sound all right on paper, but on-screen it doesn't really wash: if the girl had been half as committed to music as she now is to revenge, she would have overcome her disappointment.
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| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A big fizzle.
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| 50 |
Boston Globe
Michael Hardy
The stakes in this story seem too low to justify its audience’s attention. If The Page Turner were a novel, it would hardly be a page turner. Why should we hold films to a lower standard?
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