Beloved

Beloved spans 45 years, shifting from Paris to Prague to London to Montreal, and it boasts an especially strong performance by Paul Schneider.

It's as if he has been trying to express something, or to make his own particular kind of good movie, for 10 whole years. Now he has.

Honoré's combination of contemporary romantic hijinks and the stylization inherent in the musical genre aren't juxtaposed ironically: Beloved is a tenderly sincere musical that celebrates love even as it acknowledges the ways in which it can sometimes lead to tragedy.

Alex Beaupain's songs effectively convey emotion, but Beloved doesn't scale the heights of the Truffaut and Demy films it pastiches.

Ultimately crammed at a frustrating juncture between period-piece froth and seriously conceived drama, never tipping its hand toward either.

Even with Gallic neomusical royalty like Catherine Deneuve joining in the fray, the whole endeavor reeks of the filmmaker throwing everything against the wall yet barely making anything stick.

Honoré's made better films, and he'll make better films again; the most damning thing you can say about this one isn't that it feels like Honore doing a third-rate imitation of Francois Ozon ("Potiche," "8 Women"), but rather that it often feels like Honoré doing a third-rate imitation of himself.