Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

This is a wonderful, complicated, extremely intelligent movie. I cannot even begin to understand why it is not much more highly rated by IMDb voters. It depicts the true story of an embezzler named Alexandre Stavisky, a charming but mostly unscrupulous swindler who was able to get away with his financial fraud for a long time because he had bribed and corrupted high French government officials. Law enforcement agents from different branches of the government eventually go after him, but the agenda of some of these branches and their agents is sinister. The main characters are shown in all their complexity, virtues as well as vices. The acting and dialogue and cinematography are all first-rate.