Critic Reviews

Ryan's comic timing continues to delight, while Kline is touchingly heartfelt as a man doing what is evidently all too easy to do -- fall in love with Meg Ryan.

In French Kiss--a picture that isn't unusually funny or original but that has expert actors, smooth direction and ravishing French locales--we can get pleasure from the sheer, relaxed polish of it all, the effortless swing. It's a good time passer. [5 May 1995, p.C]

Ryan secretes cuteness as if suffering from an overactive pituitary gland. And in Lawrence Kasdan's latest, she gives you nothing more or less than herself.

The caper isn't as passionate as the title suggests—in fact, it's facile—but Ryan and Kevin Kline, as her attractive opposite, are irresistible together.

Kline saves the movie and makes it something special. He does this not only by mastering the dialect and mannerisms and convincing us he is French, but by skillfully underplaying the character and slowly revealing his humanity. It's a master star turn: He makes a better Gerard Depardieu than Gerard Depardieu. [5 May 1995, p.28]

French Kiss tries to be a glass of pink champagne, but some of the fizz has gone out of the bottle. But director Lawrence Kasdan and screenwriter Adam Brooks cram so many potshots into the piece that, after a while, it makes you laugh anyway.

Kline's Frenchman is somehow not worldly enough, and Ryan's heroine never convinces us she ever loved her fiance in the first place. A movie about this kind of material either should be about people who feel true passion or should commit itself as a comedy. Compromise is pointless.

The delicate air of romance that often makes this sort of film worthwhile is absent. French Kiss does it by the numbers, not from the heart.

French Kiss has only a tenuous hold on reality; it is far more fully steeped in the conventions of latter-day movie romance than in the messy actualities of real-life mating.

Kevin Kline has some amusing moments, but Meg Ryan's acting runs out of energy, and Lawrence Kasdan's directing is too laid-back to help her out. [7 Jul 1995, p.13]