Click here to copy URL

The Rules of the Game

La règle du jeu

1939

Jean Renoir

Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Jean Renoir, Roland Toutain ...

7.9

8,027

Drama. Comedy. Romance André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), a French aviation hero, has fallen in love with Christine de la Chesnaye (Nora Gregor), who is married to wealthy aristocrat Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio). Robert, however, has a mistress of his own, whom he invites to a weekend hunting party at his country home, along with André and his friend Octave (played by Jean Renoir himself). Meanwhile, the hired help have their own game of musical ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Howard Thompson The New York Times	"The technique is admirable throughout, with at least two sequences emerging as classics of their kind (...) A deeply personal statement of unusual richness and complexity"	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"This magical and elusive work (...) is so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and so angry, so innocent and so dangerous, that you can't simply watch it, you have to absorb it (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Chuck Bowen Slant	"The heart of Renoir’s genius was his gift for hiding that genius (...) Virtually every scene in the film is striking in one way or another (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Richard Brody The New Yorker	"It’s one of the rare movies that seems truly musical in its inspiration—and which, like much great music, envelops an astonishing complexity of invention and depth of insight in emblematically straightforward expressions."	POS
United States	Scott Tobias AV Club	"'The Rules Of The Game' makes sharp distinctions between the wealthy in the upper floors and the servants below (...) Renoir's hearty characterization complicates it and gives it life"	POS
United States	Mark Chalon Smith Los Angeles Times	"Nothing seems overwrought or studied, and it's this smooth face that lets the satire stand out in such high relief."	POS
United States	Desson Thomson The Washington Post	"On a pure entertainment level, 'Rules' is an amusing upstairs-downstairs farce that shows two societies (...) We are watching life at its messiest, unfolding at its most beautiful."	POS
United Kingdom	Steve Rose The Guardian	"Renoir was too generous to deal with such absolutes, and that's one of the reasons the film endures: nobody is good or bad, they just make good or bad decisions – hence the title."	POS
United States	Michael Wilmington Chicago Tribune	"There are about a dozen genuine miracles in the history of cinema, and one of them is Jean Renoir's supreme 1939 tragi-comedy 'The Rules of the Game'"	POS
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"It was not shown again in its complete form until 1965, when it became clear that here, perhaps, was the greatest film ever made"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.