Critic Reviews

More than on "Prime Suspect," more than any film in recent memory, Le Petit Lieutenant conveys the relentless toll of big-city police work.

Nathalie Baye is remarkable in Le Petit Lieutenant where she plays Caroline Vaudieu, a Parisian police inspector who returns to her post after a bout with alcoholism following her child's death.

A quiet powerhouse of a film, an implacable, uncompromising French police drama, both old-fashioned and modern, that underlines the reasons impeccably made crime stories do so well on screen.

A flinty, almost hardhearted work about characters who have lost almost everything in pursuit of some undefinable abstraction, like honor or their country or doing the right thing. It's an impressive film, but don't expect any warm fuzzies.

Le Petit Lieutenant embraces the spectrum of human drama and comedy, and like a lot of French films it is keenly involved with the everyday pulse of work.

The final minute of the movie is one of the most bleak, and moving, endings I've seen in years.

This is the fourth film directed and at least co-written by Beauvois. (He has acted in a number of pictures, including a previous one of his own, and he is in Le Petit Lieutenant for a while.) He is a clean and sure director, with a good selective eye: he knows where we ought to be looking at any moment. We can hope for more Beauvois films with worlds of their own.

On the surface, Le Petit Lieutenant is propelled by the search for two Russians somehow responsible for a pair of murders along the Seine. And though that's a pretty mundane setup for an urban drama, it serves nicely in allowing us to get to know the haunted Caroline and the impetuous Antoine.

A fine, taut, tough example of the realistic police drama.

The drama's moments of cinematic power more than compensate for the slow-moving stretches that don't connect, and its characters will stay with viewers long after the lights go up.