How I Killed My Father

Under Fontaine's direction, family dysfunction is an intense experience with unexpectedly positive repercussions, even if the steps between are painful and potentially deadly.

Michel Bouquet's performance makes Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father required viewing.

Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.

Fontaine and Jacques Fieschi collaborated on the screenplay, and Jocelyn Pook's chilly string score nicely evokes the menace underlying the film's plush settings.

Fontaine gives her film the tone of a psychological thriller, with the potential of violence always lurking beneath the surface.

The title is to be taken figuratively, not literally -- is a top-notch study of family angst.

A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.