Paris (2009) Critic Reviews

Klapisch's masterstroke was to place at the center of a movie a man, forced by circumstances, to stop and simply observe.Read the full review

Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing.Read the full review

Every character has life and depth. It's unusual for an episodic film to involve us so well in individual lives; as the narrative circles through their stories, we're genuinely curious about what will happen next.Read the full review

Not much happens during the course of the movie but, as with all good dramas, the protagonists are richly drawn and the events of their lives become of interest.Read the full review

If the idea of interconnectedness feels secondhand, what's fresh and affecting is the way Binoche's and Duris' characters navigate life and death.Read the full review

There are enough intersecting characters from different classes and backgrounds in Paris to evoke the city as a complex, healthy organism, whose parts are all connected. If it is too lighthearted to show the actual political and economic machinery behind it, its celebration of how well that machinery works produces a pleasant afterglow.Read the full review

As a whole, though, Paris pulses with a contemporary version of the energy that animated Balzac's novels, or Colette's accounts of the life she observed from the window of her apartment in the Palais Royal.Read the full review

Paris flits from story to story and character to character without doing justice to any of them.Read the full review

There are too many secondhand characters roving through Paris.Read the full review