The Artist

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

(PG-13)

***

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The Artist is both an “exhilarating valentine to filmmaking” and a “brazen stunt that pays off,” said Rene Rodriguez in The Miami Herald. Not merely an homage to Hollywood’s silent era, this French import is a silent movie itself. Jean Dujardin stars as a film actor whose luminous career is derailed by the arrival of talking pictures, while the new medium transforms his young love (Bérénice Bejo) into the industry’s brightest light. The story arc is “way too predictable,” and the fallen star’s “on the skids” section carries on longer than needed, said Noel Murray in the A.V. Club. But writer/director Michel Hazanavicius “finds clever, poetic ways to illustrate the allure of Golden Age Hollywood,” and his ending is “boffo.” Bit players John Goodman and James Cromwell contribute notable turns, but it is Dujardin “who best raises the ghost of an era,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. “You sense a lot of homework” behind his expert face-making, and his efforts bolster the film’s implicit argument that silent cinema really was the medium’s “purest and most binding incarnation.”