The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Niels Arestrup is striking as the hero's slumlord father.

None of this would work without Duris' simmering performance as Tom, a person who's struggling to find his true calling.

From its plot to its look, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is designed to express how it feels to be torn between two opposing worlds and passions.

Audiard has a nice stride here, establishing Tom's world and then altering it with slow insistence.

Audiard has wisely avoided the crime-movie clichés of Toback's Fingers, and if his film is not exactly naturalistic, it is steeped in a reality that makes it all the more compelling.

Emotionally richer than Fingers, and there's nothing secondhand about Duris' performance.

This violent film, which swept the Cesar awards (the French Oscars) this year, provides a nuanced portrait of a conflicted young man who can never completely break away from the dark world in which he has grown up.

Relying on the enigmatic and sultry charisma of Romain Duris, The Beat My Heart Skipped is a mesmerising portrait of a man torn by two very different sides of his personality.

A gritty urban romance that touches on the various fascinating ways that music and psychological states of mind interact or clash in a dissonant and chaotic modern world.

A riff that will provide great pleasures to those willing to sample a molto vivace remake of Toback's cinematic ode to torment and obsession.

[Duris] is pure star quality: gloweringly sexy, hypnotically unstable and needy, combining rage and vulnerability in his handsome, delicate face.

Altogether, Audiard's movie hangs together better than Toback's: it's more coherent in its construction, far less arbitrary in its dialogue, and more plausible and considered in its characterisation.