Critic Reviews

Do yourself and your kids a favor. On the way to multiplex to see "The Avengers," tell them The Fairy is about an all-powerful superheroine. Someday, they'll find the words to thank you.

For the most part, it's too dry and quirky to connect. Still, those gags are something.

This is the third feature by the three gifted stars, who deftly pull off hilarious, nearly wordless slapstick routines reminiscent of Jacques Tati, Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis.

The Fairy may be as close as we'll ever get to a live-action cartoon.

One's enjoyment of The Fairy depends a lot on knowing why it's worth seeing. It's a comedy with two or three big laughs, but it's not side-splitting. Nor does it have a particularly compelling story. Its appeal is rather in watching people who have devised their own original style of comic performance and have taken it to a rare level of refinement.

In The Fairy, Abel, Gordon and Romy have all of Le Havre as their playground. And now that the they've established the ideal format for their brand of comicbook-style humor, one can't help but wish they show the good sense to keep it at this level going forward.

While every scene is art-directed with zest and innovatively staged, The Fairy rarely inspires outright laughter. At least it respects its influences more than does "The Artist."

Deeply silly in a classic mode, The Fairy continues the French new wave of near-silent cinema.

Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny.

Deadpan clownishness is The Fairy's raison d'être and its superior mode; when the lovey-doveyness turns cloying and the atrophied message-mongering creeps in, you wish the threesome knew when to keep their traps shut.