Esther Kahn

Summer Phoenix has a screen presence that's simultaneously distancing and transfixing, an inscrutability that makes her seem either mysterious or a complete blank.

Ranks among the best films ever made about the acting profession.

Brilliantly edited and gorgeously shot, Esther Kahn is a dream to look at and, courtesy of Howard Shore's minor chords and high-strung strings, definitely something to hear.

Desplechin wants to film an adventure of the human spirit in the manner of a Hitchcockian drama, but he doesn't have a solid enough grasp of English culture to equal the complexity of his French productions like "The Sentinel" and "The Life of the Dead."

It's a charcoal draft of a movie -- magically allusive on some levels and utterly opaque on others, a strange combination of the overexplicit and the unwritten.

This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.

How do you inject life into a film whose central character is dull, slow, stupid and grim?If you're Arnaud Desplechin, you don't.