Thanks for the memories!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The film, Shakespeare's shades. At the heart of the film is love. Everything else, just around this love. And when Auteuil says: You just do not want to fight.Heroine Catherine Deneuve fights: I fall asleep with her and wake up with her. What can say more?It's a wonderful movie in the movie. Suicide. And how is it possible to live, The image Heroine (Deneuve) - two in one, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet buried in the apartment.

How to describe this film in about 25 words. I agonized over that considerably. It really defies a pithy description.Is it a crime story? Daniel Auteuil (Caché, The Valet) is a cop from a family of criminals. His big brother is killed in a botched car theft, and he is piecing things together. Of course, he is not formally investigating as it is his family involved, and also his (girlfriend, lover, whatever) is also a part of it.It is, at the same time a love story. A love triangle between Alex (Auteuil), Marie (Catherine Deneuve), and Juliette (Laurence Côte). Alex is just using Juliette to let off some steam, but does grow to love her. Marie is madly in love with her. The relationships and the criminal enterprise are intertwined to the point where you really have great difficulty describing just what the point of it all is.Me? I just enjoyed the great performances of Deneuve and Auteuil and Côte, as well as Juliette's brother (Benoît Magimel). That was enough.

This film has a complex, multi-layered structure that grabs your interest...but not much substance underneath. There's no real mystery to the plot, and no real revelations about "human nature" either. Well-acted all around - including a little boy who is wise way beyond his years. (**)

"Thieves" has Techine at the helm with Deneuve and Auetuil in the spotlight and critical plaudits aplenty. However, my reaction at the end of the two hour flick was "Yeah, so???". Telling of the intertwined lives of a cop and his brother and a girl and her lover and a handful of other people, this character driven flick wanders to and fro interminably, jumping around in time, examining the details of their fatalistic and pragmatic lives as they fuss and stew and brood over the this and that of their existence. Given subtitles and a soup thin story with no moral, no message, no hero, no villain, just character study heaped upon character study and no character that's even likeable, "Thieves" will not have much appeal for the masses. Recommended for French speakers or French film buffs only. (B)