Metacritic reviews

Similar to the recent Emmanuelle Devos drama "Gilles' Wife," but it's as cool as that one was melodramatic.

Nathalie becomes a complicated three-handed game, far more concerned with the narcissistic, pornographic and mutually manipulative relationship between Catherine and Nathalie than with the latter's purported affair with Bernard. If you live in New York, run, don't walk to see this on the big screen, because it won't be there long.

A stylish, sharply observed erotic mystery.

In different hands and different lands, the same story could easily have been a pretentious bit of "Red Shoe Diaries" piffle. But exceptional performances and the oh-so-Frenchness of the complications instead produce an erotic tale that plays like the best gossipy story you ever heard about people you thought you knew.

So what keeps the movie from being boring? Nathalie... is like lewd Eric Rohmer - that is to say that what the characters have to say is INTERESTING.

Nathalie is intricate, provocative, cleanly acted, but it's never entirely convincing--and never more so than in the table-turning climax.

Depardieu, a great actor who in recent years has delivered several overblown performances, is here measured and naturalistic, a sympathetic match for Ardant's icy obsessive, and Beart is suitably mysterious as a spy in the house of love.

Anne Fontaine's seductive film Nathalie is mostly about French star power and sex, so it's somewhat surprising that it is also subtle and intriguing.

An unconvincing psychosexual drama that tries to reconfigure the classic romantic triangle but winds up looking like a preposterous pretzel.

An intellectual-cum-sexual teaser whose twist is apparent far too early on.