Taste of Others

Pros: Actors shine. Screenplay sparkles.
Cons: Subtitles, if those count.

A "French paradox" that gets a lot of attention is about their food. How can they eat large meals filled with cheeses and other fatty foods while suffering little coronary disease and few heart attacks? Research suggests the wine they drink...

Pros: Sensitive, subtle acting, sublime comedy.
Cons: Even the title's been mucked up in translation.

This ensemble comedy film was a massive hit on its initial release in France. Benefiting from massive publicity, it did fantastic business. Is it a piece of over-hyped commercial tat then?

No. Instead of the rapid editing we see in most...

Pros: Witty, subtle, intelligent, in French - my favorite things about a French comedy.
Cons: Small complaint only: it's too sophisticated to provide much catharsis.

Two of the ladies of "Le Gout des Autres", an actress and an interior designer, are too sophisticated for their own good. The actress is perpetually nervous and in despair for her well-being, but comforts herself in her self-styled superior taste in art...

Pros: honest, measured, and quietly moving
Cons: little development or treatment of the unsympathetic characters, including the wife of the protagonist

brief review of story line(s):

a boorish (even philistinistic) businessman (evidenced in his acquiescence to his wife's grotesque taste in art and home decor and his ridiculous sense of entitlement in the face of his colleague's (an...

Pros: cast, story, etc.
Cons: none!!

This funny and darkly subversive comedy film about surbuban despair and bohemian angst has successful but dull businessman Castella(Jean-Pierre Bacri); his spoiled, neurotic interior decorator wife Angelique(Christiane Millet), Clara(Anne Alvaro), an...

Pros: Another foreign movie with meaning. Funny, dramatic, and uplifting.
Cons: none

The Taste of Others is nominated for the best foreign movie of the year. It doesn't hold the same edge of your seat excitement as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" but for a more calming night of entertainment I highly recommend you go and check this...