Fat Girl

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

With the pitiless, devastating Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat puts men and women, boys and girls on notice: When fantasy, hypocrisy, and manipulation mix in a wet, sandy place, you dive into sex at your own risk.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

An absolute stunner of a movie.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

It's a lean, mean movie, and not a pretty one, but it leaves no question as to Breillat's angular originality as a filmmaker.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Much more than a perfectly realized vignette about seduction. It is the latest and most powerful dispatch yet from Ms. Breillat, France's most impassioned correspondent covering the war between the sexes.

Variety David Stratton

Despite the disappointing conclusion, it's hard not to be affected by the film, because of the director's frank approach to her subject and the sheer skill with which she tells her story.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Proves to be a remarkably lean and incisive film about the fateful power of sexuality.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's sensuality with a stinger, and Fat Girl is an adolescent sex drama that takes no prisoners.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

There is a jolting surprise in discovering that this film has free will, and can end as it wants, and that its director can make her point, however brutally.

New Times (L.A.) Bill Gallo

In the end, leaves you feeling both violated and startlingly informed, as if a mugger had whacked you in a dark alley.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

The film's concluding sequence is bound to polarize audiences.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

This disturbing drama has many telling moments, but it ends with an out-of-the-blue shock episode that raises more questions than it answers.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Breillat has made an important, even essential work about the exploitation of young women's sexuality, but is not she complicit as well?

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

This is a different kind of girls' movie, and certainly not a pretty one, especially its horrific head-scratcher of an ending.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Characters in Breillat's movies often make sex their god, lose faith in it, then find their lives hollow and grim. Bergman wouldn't have been so concerned with bodily woes, but he'd have understood.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Like "Anais," the only surprises Breillat has in store for us are bad ones. In the willfully perverse final act, she delivers a sadistic blow to the audience -- with a sledgehammer.

Chicago Reader Meredith Brody

The shocking, ambiguous ending might have been better served by the film's original, ambiguous title, "To My Sister."

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Uncompromising and unforgiving, but ultimately more self-destructive than any of its characters.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

So daring and unsparing in its depiction of the psyche and experience of adolescent girls that it's hard to imagine an audience that wouldn't find it deeply provocative despite a slow pace.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

A lovely minor achievement. It would have been major if Breillat had been more expansive with respect to Anaïs instead of contentedly letting her go on about her lumpish ways.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

The kind of stunning and contentious work of art that will leave a lot of folks speechless.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

A laser-sharp evocation of the tortured ties that bind sisters, who can love and loathe each other simultaneously and inflict lifelong wounds with chilling expertise.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

It's all well-acted and eerily compelling, but the shocker ending is patently implausible.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

Assails with its in-your-face, repulsively compelling (like a train wreck) brutality.