Metacritic reviews

If you like romantic movies but find Hollywood's increasingly sterile formulas to be a poisonous bore, Love Me if You Dare offers an antidote.

Much of the style strains too hard to be cute, but true romantics may shed copious tears of sympathy and empathy.

The rueful ghost of François Truffaut hovers over writer-director Yann Samuell's wonderfully capricious tale of Gallic lovers with no idea of when to say finis.

A perversely dark romantic comedy shot and edited in the contemporary fairy-tale style of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amélie." But this one has a dagger for a heart.

Despite the sterling performances by the two main actors, the movie tends to lose pace in the second half and needs more secondary characters. But for a first time in the director's chair, Samuell shows a deftness of touch that bodes well for the future.

The award for the most annoying character to appear in a movie so far this year turns out to be a tie: It goes to both of the oh-so-swankly tormented romantic mischief makers of Love Me if You Dare.

The film's attempts at meaning do it in. The longer it goes on and the darker it grows, the further it drifts from any kind of human experience, outside of its protagonists' particular flavor of madness.

Valiant attempt to create a modern fairytale ends up being frustratingly creepy instead of haunting and memorable.

The movie's hyperactivity eventually yields to such revelations as Life Isn't a Game and The Biggest Dare Is Love, but the ultimate measure of its conventionality is its soundtrack.

The film is loaded with striking visuals, high energy and all-stops portrayals from its actors, but for all of Samuell's imaginative cinematic bravura, it is, finally, mainly exasperating. Phooey on Julien and Sophie's excruciating l'amour fou.