Critic Reviews

Jacques Audiard’s superb drama, which won the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, rises to the challenge with the power of art and not a scintilla of sentimentality.

This really is Audiard operating at the top of his game, mostly dropping the contrivances of "Rust & Bone" for incisive character studies and a deeply humane, almost warm, worldview.

Clear-eyed, tightly wound, and cinematically and psychologically immersive, it’s a furious ride of a movie that actually has something to say.

Proceeds without flashy tricks or showy technique, offering the pleasures of captivating storytelling with an irresistible human pulse.

[Mr. Audiard] makes popcorn movies disguised as art films, and vice versa. Dheepan is a bit like a Liam Neeson revenge-dad action thriller directed by the Dardenne brothers. I mean that in the best possible way.

Though Dheepan is another triumph for Audiard, it could have just as easily not worked had its leads not been so affecting

The final third of Audiard's drama falls into crime-drama mode. It is tense and violent. But even if it feels true, given Dheepan's history with the Tamil Tigers, it also feels a little beside the point.

There’s no doubt that Audiard has invested a story of grief, dispossession and desire with immediate, almost tactile, urgency. Like the best fiction, it takes the most incomprehensible stories of our time and makes them hauntingly, inescapably clear.

For most of the movie, Dheepan, for all its flaws, is hard-hitting in ways that count. It has the intimacy of a personal drama but the amplitude of a much larger immigrant odyssey.

This may not be the director’s most immediately electrifying film, but in its understated way, it’s an immensely powerful work.