Wonderful character development!

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I am a great fan of Ozon and many of the fine actresses in this film but "8 Women" is worse than terrible. It's lazy, self-indulgent, insulting to the intelligence and, well, ultimately plain boring when not infuriating. Really, really, give this a miss and do something of value with your life (if it's only to do your hair and clip your toe-nails).

8 women find themselves trapped in a large mansion in the middle of a snow storm. The only male family member has been killed, and as the women try to discover who the murderer amongst them is, nasty family truths are revealed along the way.Now, being rather cynical by nature, I find farces and parodies quite difficult to stomach and am perhaps not the best person to ask an opinion about such a film as 'Huit femmes'. It admittedly took me a bit of time to find the funny side of the women bursting unexpectedly into song intermittently during the course of the film and I couldn't help finding the purposefully complicated narrative involving adultery, alcoholism, lesbianism, incest, just stupidly tedious rather than witty and sharp.Yet, with a star-studded cast who manage to portray their characters beyond their clichés (I was afraid, for example, that Virginie Ledoyen's Suzon was going to remain a prim and pretty faced 'goody two shoes' throughout the film), the film's self-conscious theatricality, and the clever twist of the film's dénouement, 'Huit femmes', was more enjoyable than I first expected (especially having seen the sickly pinks and pastel colours of the DVD case's front cover).You will either find 'Huit femmes' very entertaining or distinctly tiresome, it's all according to taste. However, for my part, I found it quite difficult to care by end.

A group of the best French actors: Catherine Deneuve (Indochine), Isabelle Huppert (My Mother, The Piano Teacher), Emmanuelle Béart (The 4 Musketeers), Fanny Ardant (Paris, I Love You), Virginie Ledoyen (The Beach), Danielle Darrieux (Dangerous Liaisons, Persepolis), Ludivine Sagnier (Paris I Love You, Swimming Pool), and Firmine Richard gather together to present a mystery-comedy-musical feast that was pure delight.One would immediately think that a film called 8 femmes and featuring incest and lesbianism would possibly be a bit salacious, but that is far from the truth. This was a film about women, and their vices and secrets and jealousies.There was a mystery - Gaby's (Catherine Deneuve) husband is found dead; and, of course, all of the women are suspect for different reasons. There is the comedy as the layers keep being pealed like an onion to reveal the truth. While this is going on, we pause eight times to hear a song by each of the women. What fun! This was an enjoyable film and the chance to see eight of France's best act and sing should not be missed.

Or, usually, the work would not stop there. Here it did.The renowned actresses try their best. I can't even say that the plot is bad because it could have worked (the two points I gave are to be derived from that). The problem was that the story just got lost and the movie became a parody of itself. It does not do well as a crime, comedy or musical movie in any manner. 1. Musical? You would need to be able to sing and dance for that to decent melodies. Forget it. I am a musical fan, believe me, this is not a musical in any respect. It is true that there are attempts at some screeching to music-like tunes but saying that there be singing and music is simply not true. 2. Comedy? In as much as this is ridiculous, yes. I also have to admit that I am not an admirer of the so called "French humor" (in case this phenomenon exists at all, anyone encountered it yet?), and could not recognize any comedic parts in here either. 3. Crime time line lost. As a result of the genre mix, the crime line that could have been doing well (I even venture to say that in the beginning, you do have suspense), fades away very soon.4. Lack of characters that are at least interesting. The female characters depicted are to the greatest extent unlikeable and unlikely.A good deal of the screening time tries to deal with the tangled interpersonal relationship of the eight women, but due to lack of time and artistic virtues on behalf of the director (oh yes, it is true, sorry), it just gets out of bounds and is incomprehensible and uninteresting. There is no likeness whatsoever to Agatha Christie's any works (except maybe the very early and lame Mary Westmacott love stories she started with). I do not know, why 8 Femmes has such an excellent rating at IMDb, I suppose it can be derived from the general respect for the cast members, but otherwise, this movie did not work for me, it did not work in any genre it attempted to form the part of, and is should not be legal to have such casts wasted all for nothing.