Read My Lips

Not a heist film, a thriller, a twisted romance, a film noir or a character study, but a unique concoction that bends all these genres to its vision.

While the plot twists in Read My Lips may be too intensely melodramatic for some tastes, the performances of the two leads are impeccable, just about compelling our belief.

Exciting to watch: The audio disruptions of Carla putting in or taking out her hearing aids and the inventiveness of the way the heist plot is revealed are just a couple of the film's treats.

Not a simpleminded movie in which merely being ABLE to read lips saves the day. In this brilliant sequence, she reads his lips and that ALLOWS them to set into motion a risky chain of events based on the odds that the bad guys will respond predictably.

Improbably, Read My Lips escapes the cynicism of much contemporary neo-noir, if only by a hair, by ending as a love story of delightful crackpot idealism, in which Paul has made a crook and a hussy out of Carla, and she's made a gentleman out of him.

A gritty thriller on the theme of the con man conned. It works as well as it does thanks to a captivating lead performance by Emmanuelle Devos and the superb direction of Jacques Audiard.

The first half is a well-acted psychological drama, but the second half is standard thriller fare with more action than insight.