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Jerry Lewis has always been one of the most awesomely gifted comedians in the business. He can make you laugh so hard, your ribs hurt. He can also bore (and embarrass) the snot out of you. This movie is, truthfully, uneven. The first ten minutes, as the poor schnook tries merely to sit down in a doctor's office, are brilliant, screamingly funny. Other bits (there really isn't much of a plot) traverse a range from lying there like iron ingots to surreally jaw-dropping. The French aren't necessarily crazy. The highs in this movie soar, the lows strain to reach the curb. Welcome to a Jerry Lewis movie. If you can't handle that, this isn't for you.

I don't know. It seems to me that Americans have lost their taste for "small" films - films that emphasize character, rather than explosions and movement. You get the same sort of comments with movies like Tim Burton's wonderful Big Fish or Spielberg's Terminal. I will admit that the Dunst character is a cliché, but this movie is really about the extras, the characters that step out of the background, have their moment, and step back again. Paula Dean stands out as a woman to whom family -- *all* her family -- is all-important and who keeps it together with food and photographs. I'm not from Kentucky or the South, although I've lived South for a number of years. I'm not that interested in *my* extended family -- and in that respect I'm far closer to the Bloom character than to the Dean character. But I recognize that this film is a great portrait of a certain kind of family life. Also, the dead father becomes a very well-rounded character indeed, as you think about the contradictions of his life. This is a film that expects the audience to do a little work, and it pays very well for that work.

I think this one of Lumet's best. He always gave something extra when the milieu was New York. Unusually for Lumet, this is a comedy, and one with an adult sensibility at that. This movie brilliantly explores a certain subset of New York: the liberal, mostly Jewish intellectuals, the Lionel Trilling wannabes. Every scene, even every set, rings true. This movie means "New York" to me more than any Woody Allen film I've seen. New York is usually a mere backdrop in Allen's movies. He's more interested in moral than social types. Indeed, Allen, were he not so good, could have easily become one of the characters in Braverman. Furthermore, Braverman moves better than most of Allen's films. Every performance is a winner: Jack Warden, Alan King, Joseph Wiseman, Jessica Walter, Sorrell Brooke, and especially George Segal, who holds the picture together as a kind of moral quester, a man who really does want to know the truth of things but has no idea how to find it. The screenplay by Herb Sargent is so good, you gnash your teeth wondering why so few movie people gave him work.