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Reviews Counted: 24
Fresh: 20
Rotten:4
Average Rating: 7.1/10
Consensus: A Secret is poignant, sad, and beautifully crafted, featuring fine performances that stave off a drift toward soap opera territory.
Rated: Not Rated
Genre: Foreign Films
Theatrical Release: Sep 5, 2008 Limited
Box Office: $451,586
Synopsis: A SECRET follows the saga of a Jewish family in post-World War II Paris. François, a solitary, imaginative child, invents for himself a brother as well as the story of his parents` past. But on his fifteenth birthday, he discovers a dark... [More]
Starring: Patrick Bruel, Ludivine Sagnier, Julie Depardieu, Mathieu Amalric
Director: Claude Miler
I was not prepared for the climactic emotional devastation, but as all the pieces fall into place, the film crystallises as perfectly as Tania's flawless backward high dive piercing through the clear water with beauty and precision.
Top Critic Miller and his excellent cast create characters whom we can understand and even empathize with, even as they commit horrible breaches of faith.
Beautifully and poignantly captures the complexities of being a Jew in France from the 1930's to the present, where layers of a family's history are revealed by jumping back and forth in time.
A fine drama that stands as Gallic vet Claude Miller's best in at least a decade.
Top Critic Given its crackerjack performances and fine evocation of period, Miller’s film has already been a popular offering in Paris and should not long remain a secret from sophisticated moviegoers when it opens in the States.
A blue-chip cast and handsome stagings do little to prevent this French movie being a muddled, pretentious washout. Substantial re-editing might have helped.
Top Critic Engaging wartime drama that pulls off a bold narrative shift, thanks to impressive direction and superb performances from a talented ensemble cast.
The acting is exceptional. If parts of A Secret veer toward soap opera, the ensemble work reduces the suds to a minimum.
Top Critic A harrowing and wrenching coming-of-age story in which François wrestles with the question of identity.
Top Critic Miller, a skilled veteran, reverses the old visual pattern for films with lengthy flashbacks: he shoots the past in color and the (evolving) present in black and white.
A poignant French film that shows the mysterious power family secrets can have upon our lives and how we see the world.
Claude Miller's World War II domestic drama is unusually attentive to the way that the Holocaust disrupted lives that were messy enough to begin with.
Claude Miller's ravishingly shot drama gives up its titular mystery early, but there's plenty of cinematic intrigue well after what's covert in this complicated family story becomes overt.
What is most impressive about A Secret is the way Mr. Miller artfully and gently gestures toward such enormous themes without spelling them out.
Top Critic Not very easy to follow, but the twists and turns are gripping and emotional
The almost egregiously deliberate pace with which Miller has infused the production ultimately turns out to be far more problematic than one might initially have suspected...
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