Who payed the critics

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

"Le Serpent" must be the millionth variation on the innocent-man-on-the-run theme; Hollywood has been doing this sort of story for decades. The script, for some reason, makes it perfectly clear right from the start who the bad guy is and how he operates, thereby largely removing the element of surprise; when he starts infiltrating the life of the leading man, we're waiting for the latter to catch up to what we already know. Still, taken on its own terms (and genre), "Le Serpent" is well-made and has some suspenseful moments, though you have to wait for more than an hour for most of them (at 116 minutes, this film is too long). Clovis Cornillac makes a very convincing bad guy. Olga Kurylenko's part is played up in some DVD posters because of her subsequent stardom, but it's really quite small (and yes, it does feature nudity, but she is a little too thin for my tastes here). **1/2 out of 4.

Despite a raft of clichés and see-it-coming plot twists, French movie The Serpent is an intelligent and stylish thriller, which delivers its intentions without popcorn gloss. Yvan Attal is the anti-hero photographer who is framed by a beautiful model and thereon in blackmailed by and old boyhood 'friend' who is, surprise surprise, a psychotic killer (Cloris Cornillac) out for revenge after a traumatised youth perpetrated by his old pals. For good measure, he is still obsessed with his recently deceased mother, and regularly visits her glass coffin to pay homage (just in case we really wanted a big neon sign as to who the psycho is or will turn out to be). Yet for all that, the movie still delivers with an assured confidence, and the cast do well and lift it to very decent heights.

One of the plus factors about this excellent thriller is that unless you happen to live there you wouldn't know you were in Paris; a few years ago there was an equally fine thriller, A La Petite Semaine which was shot largely in Porte de Clignacourt, North Paris whilst this one was shot mainly a few miles West in La Defense (whose Metro station was used to great effect in Buffet Froid. There have been several notable French films in this genre lately, indeed the most recent, Ne le dis a personne (Tell No One) has only just finished making the rounds, and now here is yet another perhaps just a notch or two below 'personne' but still very, very good. The two have elements in common, an ordinary man suddenly involved in a nightmare and coming under suspicion of murder, there's even a chase sequence similar to but briefer and less tense than the one with Vincent Cluzet which is not the same as saying that Yvan Attal is not every bit as fine an actor as Cluzet and he more than holds his own against Clovis Cornillac (who also had a large role in A La Petite Semaine) who has by far the 'showier' role as a psychotic obsessed with vengeance for a childhood prank that went wrong. Why they had to go to Finland for Attal's wife I'll never know - his own long-time real life partner Charlotte Gainsbourg could have played it equally well - but Minna Haapkyla is certainly adequate. All in all this is a stylish thriller and more than worth watching out for.

"Le Serpent" refers to the snake tattooed across the back of bad guy Joseph Plender (Clovis Cornillac), a seriously mixed-up individual who traces all his problems to a childhood prank that went horribly wrong. The man he holds responsible is Vincent Mandel, a fashion photographer played by Yvan Attal. The title may also be a reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, though no-one could describe Vincent's life as paradise, even before the arrival of Plender. He's in the middle of a messy divorce, and the last thing he needs is a ghost from his past that could prejudice his chances of getting custody of his children.Yvan Attal is an appealing choice for the role of Vincent. He has the range to be both vulnerable in the early scenes, and tough and resourceful as the story develops. Clovis Cornillac, as Vincent's nemesis, gives a performance that is (necessarily) more contained, but is nevertheless very effective. His most interesting scene comes when Vincent's beautiful wife (Minna Haapkyla) offers herself to him and his response is to walk off in disgust and scrub himself from head to foot.Though the film has the ability to surprise in scenes such as this, there's no escaping the fact that this is a conventional Hollywood psychological thriller in French dressing. Plender's progression from slimy blackmailer to serial-murdering super-villain is all part of the formula for such things, as is the flight from the police, the mano-a-mano confrontation (one of them does remember to bring a gun but it's quickly lost), the false ending...The solid performances (including comedian Pierre Richard, cast against type as a fellow victim of Plender) and some stylish direction by Eric Barbier help to compensate for the fairly predictable story. Those looking for more intelligence, originality and depth in their recent French psycho-thrillers should turn to "Caché", "Feux rouges", "Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien" and "Ne le dis à personne", to name just four examples. Each of those films will reward repeated viewings. "Le Serpent", I fear, will not.