Metacritic reviews

While the story pivots on an actual girl-who-cried-wolf incident, this elegantly constructed movie is about much more than that.

Given several years’ distance from the media blitz, Téchiné brings clarity, maturity, and perspective to the case while still subtly addressing all the thorny social issues the affair touched off.

Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne gives a smoldering performance as Jeanne.

Andre Techine's many admirers will not be disappointed by his latest offering, The Girl on the Train, but they might be hard-pressed to define it.

From this polarizing lie, Techine fashions a brilliantly complex, intimate multi-strander, held together but somewhat skewed by the central perf of Emilie Dequenne ("Rosetta"), whose radiant physicality threatens to eclipse even Catherine Deneuve.

For better or worse, there isn't a human experience that French director André Téchiné can resist lathering into a tone poem.

The film can be described as a character study or a fictionalized slice of terribly real life. Mostly, though, it is an inquiry into the mysteries of other people.

Téchiné has made a half-captivating, half-baffling tease of a movie in which one woman's destructive whim has the effect of making anti-Semitism look like a myth. It's a distortion that Téchiné, with a passivity bordering on perversity, does nothing to dispel.

For those of us who’ve been fans of Dequenne since her role as a blanc-trash Belgian waif in "Rosetta" (1999), her subtle portrayal of the pathological perpetrator proves that she’s monumentally talented.

The narrative lacks a magnetic north; it encompasses so much, and the needle swings from Jeanne’s predicament to her mother’s dismay and to the support that comes from a celebrated Jewish lawyer, played by the ever-compelling Michel Blanc.