Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

GUENOT PHILIPPE I won't add much to the other comments. It's a very intriguing film, confusing too, and the audience may have some difficulties to follow. But, as usual in Nicloux's features, it's not senseless and especially very dark. Very weird. Many things remain unexplained. The character of Thierry Lhermitte is the same in another Guillaume Nicloux's movie: CETTE FEMME LA. He also played a character like this - a private eye - in a movie from 1984: UN ETE D'ENFER.This story is very like another film, also starring Guillaume Canet and Jean Rochefort: NE LE DIS A PERSONNE. In this last film, Rochefort had a character very similar. A supporting one, but interesting too. A complex topic concerning the dark past, a disgusting tale that explodes to the face of many people, some decades later.

gridoon2018 Jumping constantly between 2 time periods (1975 and 2007) and at least 3 different groups of characters, "The Key" is mainly an exercise in narrative complexity that does not satisfy very much emotionally. Admittedly there are some very suspenseful and well-done moments (the throat stabbing and the subsequent escape attempt), but in trying to interconnect all the different time periods and story lines, the screenwriters are forced to use a few too many coincidences, most notably at the end, when somehow almost every character ends up at the same hospital at the same time (also, I'm still not sure if the hero gets in so much trouble because he is mistaken for a thief by drug runners, or because of his father's criminal past, or both). The cast is good as usual for a French movie, but the lovely Marie Gillain unfortunately gets stuck with the poorly written character of the obnoxiously nagging wife. All in all, "Le Clef" is an interesting but forgettable experiment. **1/2 out of 4.

groggo If you plan to watch this film, bring an ample bucket of patience along with your popcorn. Within 15 minutes, this flick descends into murky and contrived situations that will leave your head spinning. You are watching two parallel films (one in the present, one in flashbacks 32 years earlier), but you're also watching perhaps two or three OTHER sub-plotted films, with shady and brutal characters weaving in and out, some appearing or reappearing or just disappearing altogether.The 'plot' for this flick is so contrived that, as a mere mortal, I'm at a loss to explain it. As an act of symbolism (what happens to children snatched from birth), it works, at least on one level.Guillaume Cantet plays Eric, the son of a father he never knew (he was abandoned at birth). He receives an urn containing the ashes of his father from (what else?) a mysterious source who (what else?) REMAINS mysterious. We presume the urn really contained not ashes, but drugs, coveted by nasty druglords who come from somewhere (Marseilles? Paris? Who knows?) As with so much in this film, these shadowy druglords are enigmatic figures used as 'add-ons' when we already have too many 'add-ons'. A barely recognizable Thierry Lhermitte plays a man who needs some kind of brain 'graft' if he wishes to survive. Such a 'graft' can only come from his daughter, who may, or may not be, Cecile (Vanessa Paradis), a cheap roadside hooker who manages to be kidnapped by the druglords, hidden in a cellar, and escapes through an odd, and, yes, confusing twist of events. I kept rewinding this film, trying to really understand it. No such luck. The 'clef' (key) of the title re-emerges in the end, in yet another peculiar twist that isn't really explored. And that pretty well sums up this flick for me: a lot of tantalizing 'twists'. The terrific Josie Balasko plays Michele, a dogged and philosophical detective in the 1970s who believes in 'parallel universes' -- intimate events affecting people connected in different places and time. The great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski explored this theme on numerous occasions, most successfully perhaps in 'The Double Life of Veronique'. This 'parallel' theme is really what this film is supposed to be about, it seems to me, but it just doesn't work. Marie Gillain plays Eric's long-suffering wife Audrey. Unfortunately, she doesn't have much to do in this film. This should have been a superlative thriller, but it couldn't find a cohesive thread to compound the suspense. It has a lot of style with jolt-a-minute editing and often irritating (and disruptive) hand-held camera work. In short: as so often happens in movies such as La Clef, style supersedes substance.

writers_reign Having written, directed and even taken a small role in one of the best thrillers in recent years, Ne le dis a personne, Guillaume Canet settles for the lead in yet another fine French thriller with more twists than the tornado that carried Dorothy off to Oz. It's difficult to describe the plot in too much detail so suffice it to say that Canet plays a guy who never knew his father then one day out of the blue he gets a phone call from a guy who not only claims to have known the father but is also in possession of the late man's ashes which he offers to Canet. In a parallel story line cop Josie Balasko is working a case thirty years earlier in 1975 and if that doesn't whet your appetite - you may remember Balasko has already played a great cop in Cette femme-la - nothing will. There are also some other tasty actors around such as a bearded Thierry Thermitte looking bizarrely like Spike Milligan, Jean Rochefort and Marie Gillain as Cantet's wife. Gillain has another film in the salles this week in which she is blonde as against her brunette here though she doesn't need peroxide to switch from drama to romantic comedy given that she's a fine actress which is more than can be said for Vanessa Paradis who is also on hand looking like forty miles of bad road. This is a fine thriller which needs to be seen more than once.