Critic Reviews

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

Christophe Honoré goes epic in a tale of interlocking lives that owes a debt to Jacques Demy. It won't be to everyone's taste but it's playful enough to win us over.

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.

Beloved never really earns its sprawling timeline, eventually getting bogged down with too many developments and overstaying its welcome. For a movie where people intermittently burst into song, the plot is oddly one-note.

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.

By the time it glides -- not lumbers -- to the closing credits, it's also amazingly moving.

Beloved is at once whimsical and heartfelt, alive to the absurdity and perversity of amorous behavior and also to the gravity and intensity of human emotions.

At 40, Mastroianni is looking more and more like her father, Marcello Mastroianni. She has his eyes and that air of existential befuddlement, and she's beginning to suggest the magnificent ruin he became in his later career.

The movie is at its lightest, most charming and most persuasive in the 60s; as it approaches the present, something inescapably preposterous weighs it down, though Honoré carries it off with some flair.

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