Save your money for something good and enjoyable

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

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.

Blistering performances.

Going to new places, especially when you are a bit older and are more likely to have settled down elsewhere, is difficult. About those difficulties, finding oneself and others (and love and work and ...) ... this is what this movie is about. It's mature in its thinking and might not be the entertainment some seek. But for what it is (and for the actors it has in it), it's really good.It's not that much happens, but that is life (mostly, unless you are a special agent or whatnot). There is also nudity and god forbid intercourse. But there is also comedy and "betrayal" and situations you might encounter in life. And decisions ... decisions and more decisions! What is there in the end?

Writing the review of a movie two weeks later is an exercise that I should try more often. 'Casee-tete Chinois' is one of the two movies I have seen before I went to a vacation where other priorities pushed aside writing about movies. The last installment in the series of director Cedric Klapisch , starring Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou and Cecile De France was the least memorable of the two lighter summer comedies that I found appropriate for the mood and the times.The film does have a lot of ingredients that would possibly make a success possible and even probable. A team of actors that now should not only know each other so well that the director needs only to raise an eyebrow in order to make things happen but who obviously enjoy acting together, and bringing on screen the romantic issues of their generation. A couple of kids who like almost any couple of kids steal the show as long as they are on screen and provide an emotional justification for the plot. Paris for a bit and Manhattan for most of the time - allegedly the best background for movies that directors and viewers could ask for.And yet, the result is only half satisfying.It may be that the plot of the French immigrant trying to settle in New York was brought to screen once too many? I can remember a few other such features (yes, some of the candidates to America may not have been French) starting with 'Green Card' starring Gérard Depardieu, and Andie MacDowell back in 1990. If the theme is back on screen maybe what is missing is some new and fresh angle in the infinite possibilities of approaching cultural gaps. Variations is a legitimate musical or cinematographic genre, but it needs to bring something new to be special. This film starts with a divorce, ends with a wedding, I am so happy to see Audrey Tautou happy and denying with a new film her intentions to quit acting, but the result is unconvincing entertainment. Maybe too many ingredients for a feel-good movie brought together do not necessarily make a good feel-good movie.

It's great even if you haven't seen the 2 first movies! But if you have, know that it brings you the same kind of lightness and fun. Makes you want to enjoy life to the fullest! Each character is perfectly built up, and you get attached to all of them (I feel like I know them personally and would happily move in with them!)Of course, this movie builds up on the story that started 20 years earlier, so it's great to see how each of these people evolved, how life changes, and how it's still linked to the past. It's hard not to fall in love with these people! Each of the 3 movies happens in a totally different place. So let yourself be carried away!

The threequel to 'Pot Luck' and 'Russian Dolls', 'Chinese Puzzle' picks up the story of French writer Xavier (Romain Duris, engaging as ever). He's now married to Briton Wendy (Kelly Reilly), with whom he has two children. His Belgian lesbian chum Isabelle (Cécile De France) is obsessing about having children and Xavier agrees, against Wendy's wishes, to provide the sperm with which Isabelle will be artificially inseminated (who said romance was dead?) Meanwhile, Wendy meets an American and sets up home with him in New York, taking her and Xavier's children with her. Distraught at losing contact with the children, Xavier relocates to New York himself. But will he ever find lasting love?There are many things casually presented as acceptable here which some may take issue with (eg the self-indulgent, artificial creation of children in a time of over-population; visa-convenient marriages). But this film is so feel-good that even a grouch like me sat grinning - or laughing out loud - for much of it. Returning players Duris, De France and Audrey Tautou slip on their former roles with ease; Reilly's acting I found a bit too soap operaish. Of the new characters, Jason Kravits, as Duris' sleazy lawyer, does a fine comic turn. The film is pure entertainment - in fact, if it weren't for Xavier and Wendy's annoyingly precocious, wise-beyond-his-years son, it would be near perfect. But this is still another splendid chapter in Cédric Klapisch's romcom saga.