Coco Before Chanel is a French film (with English subtitles) directed by Anne Fontaine, about the early life of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's formative years. As a child she is dropped off in an orphanage, then goes on to work in a bar. She becomes a seamstress to the performers and sings in there herself, and is nicknamed "Coco" after a song she sing with her sister (who is a composite of Chanel's sister and mother.) Her lover Baron Balsan introduces her to French society and she begins her fashion career by designing hats for his friends. Their relationship becomes complicated when she falls in love with English businessman Arthur Capel, and eventually she goes on to open her first dress-making studio.

While some critics praised the film for delving into a little-known period of the designer's life, other said by ending before she becomes famous the film doesn't reveal what made Chanel unique. Tautou plays Chanel as harder woman than her previous characters, but some found her unsympathetic and Tautou too "winsome" for the role. However, in general, the performances are good and those with some interest in fashion are likely to find it entertaining, though uninformative.

Here's what the critics are saying:

USA Today

As such, the film, directed by Anne Fontaine (The Girl From Monaco), is not an expansive biopic but a fascinating snapshot of a pivotal chapter for Chanel, her formative fashionista years. Because it's more superficially stylish than profound, Coco leaves one wanting more - more of an in-depth examination of her complex nature, and more about the years when her simple designs captivated the fashion world. Still, the film, while scaled-down, is quite beautifully woven, like a classic Chanel tweed.

The Los Angeles Times

Coco Before Chanel [is] a superior filmed biography that brings intelligence, restraint and style to what could have been a more standard treatment. The most obvious credit goes to the strong, sure performance of Tautou, who costarred in The Da Vinci Code following her breakthrough in the successful Amélie. Tautou not only resembles Chanel, she inhabits the role completely, using flashing eyes and a relentless intelligence to convey the unbending strength of a woman determined to make something of her life in a time and place when that was far from the norm.

The New York Times

Judgments are not really on the movie's agenda. Rather than take a moralizing or pitying view of its characters, who live according to the social mores of their era and the logic of their desires, Ms. Fontaine examines them with curiosity and compassion. The result is an unusually vivid and convincing account of the historical past, composed in the present tense. Though its mood and methods are different, Coco Before Chanel shares with Jane Campion's Bright Star - another new anti-biopic - a fascination, at once intense and dispassionate, with the lives of women in earlier centuries. Coco and Fanny Brawne, the heroine of Ms. Campion's film, are not victims of oppression or paragons of resistance but rather individuals, made not of ideology or wishful thinking but of flesh and blood.

New York Daily News

There are a select few artists who can take the same materials used by everyone else and create a masterpiece. Coco Chanel was one of them. Director Anne Fontaine is not. Fontaine is a competent filmmaker, and Coco Before Chanel is a mildly entertaining period piece. What's missing, ironically enough, is a distinct sense of style.But though Tautou looks charming in her character's boyish outfits, her Coco is a demanding narcissist who draws minimal empathy. And despite some cutting and stitching here and there, we never learn what distinguished this woman from all the others who made their own clothes at the time.

Associated Press

Of course, Tautou looks adorably chic in Chanel's clothes, with her petite, androgynous frame and big, brown eyes. Still, you wonder what moved her, aside from the simplicity of the men's outfits that would inspire her own suits and hats... Fontaine's camera glides smoothly, as if to invoke Chanel's perspective in assessing the fashions she sees around her. She goes through all the paces elegantly but never reaches out and grabs you. Certainly, focusing on the formative time in Chanel's life is preferable to a cursory, all-encompassing biopic. But Coco Before Chanel only starts to get interesting when she asserts her creative and financial freedom - and that's right when the movie's about to end.

The New Yorker

The problem for Audrey Tautou is that she is doomed to trail clouds of Amélie wherever she goes. Those inky round eyes and that pixie mug insure that hers are the features, poor thing, that social anthropologists will eternally reach for when asked to illustrate the term gamine. Or mignonne. She does her best to capture the sullen grit of the young Coco, and the sour distaste she felt for those off whom she sponged; but it's hard to jut your jaw when you don't have much of a jaw, just a perfectly rounded chin, and the adamantine hardness of Chanel-not just in her bone structure and bearing but in the elimination of all fuss from her couture and all wasteful palaver from her soul-is probably beyond an actress as winsome as Tautou. The ideal would have been Kristin Scott Thomas, twenty years ago. Maybe she could take over, should Fontaine decide to tell the rest of the tale.

Time

Those who love fashion will be intrigued by this, at least to a point, after which Coco Before Chanel starts to feel like witnessing a sponge at work in the act of absorption. That's not generally the stuff of compelling cinema. We prefer the end results of a personal education rather than the acquisition of it. If Project Runway were about the formation of the designers' sensibilities rather than the creative execution of that sensibility, would anyone watch? This automatically puts Fontaine's film at a disadvantage, and the truly enigmatic nature of her subject only compounds it. "You want, but you don't know what," Emilienne tells Coco, and the movie keeps us at that same remove. It may be too respectful of the legend it seeks to illuminate.

Below is the trailer for Coco Before Chanel:

Washington Post:

But it turns out that "Australia," which arrives in the wake of much gossip about a troubled production, a disastrously swollen budget and multiple endings, doesn't wink as often as it genuflects toward its massive subject and, even more worshipfully, toward old-school Hollywood schmaltz. A wildly ambitious, luridly indulgent spectacle of romance, action, melodrama and revisionism, "Australia" is windy, overblown, utterly preposterous and insanely entertaining.

The New York Times:

More than anything else in the film, Nullah included, Ms. Kidman tethers “Australia” to the world of human feeling and brings Mr. Luhrmann’s outrageous flights of fancy down to earth. That may not be where he prefers to make movies, but it’s a necessary place for even a fantasist to visit. Although many of his Western contemporaries like to root around in down-and-dirty realism, Mr. Luhrmann maintains a full-throttle commitment to cinematic illusion and what he characterizes as the “heightened artifice” of his so-called Red Curtain trilogy, “Strictly Ballroom,” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge.” You may not always see the people for the production design in these, but when you do — as in “Romeo + Juliet” and sometimes here — they spring forth from their fantastical milieus like fists.

Slate:

t's a mystery to me how Baz Luhrmann continues to be regarded as a director worth following. A long time has passed since I've regarded his lush, loud, defiantly unsubtle output with anything but dread. In Australia, his new romantic-epic-Western-protest-war drama, Luhrmann's dedication to cliché has become so absolute, it starts to verge on a kind of genius. There's not a single music cue that isn't obvious (swelling strings to indicate heartbreak, wailing didgeridoo to signal aboriginal nobility). Nary a line of dialogue is spoken that hasn't been boiled down, like condensed milk, from a huge vat of earlier Hollywood films (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Out of Africa, and various John Ford cattle-drive pictures being the most obvious referents). But to marvel at the purity of Australia's corniness isn't to imply that the movie functions as so-bad-it's-good camp, or guilty pleasure, or anything else involving aesthetic enjoyment. Audiences without a vast appetite for racial condescension, CGI cattle, and backlit smooches will sit through Australia with all the enthusiasm of the British convicts who were shipped to that continent against their will in the late 18th century.

Salon:

Luhrmann — the good-crazy Luhrmann — has a taste for lavish spectacles, and he places an elaborate set piece smack in the middle of "Australia" that, as I watched it, made me believe the movie had completely recovered from its wobbly beginning and would only get better. Boy, was I wrong: The second half of "Australia," Luhrmann's attempt to pull off a wartime weeper, is so aggressively sentimental that it begins to feel more like punishment than pleasure. I left "Australia" feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.

USA Today:

The film is visually arresting, with some notably Remington-style painterly landscapes. But the banal story and predictable arc seems a departure for director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!), whose work is usually more inventive.

Entertainment Weekly:

Long before the second hour of Australia (which feels like the fifth), it's clear that Luhrmann hasn't found a satisfactory way to make a movie nearly as ballsy — or coherent — as he wants his creation to be. Missing the e 
in epic, the filmmaker has produced a labored pic, weighed down by the very artifice that is traditionally his specialty. And slogging on into the third hour (or is it the eighth?) of his antipodean attempt at Gone With the Wind — complete with themes of love, war, racism, and the joys of playing a harmonica — Luhrmann employs the brute strength one might expect of...maybe a drover.

The New York Observer:

As year-end movies go, I had high hopes for Australia. I really wanted to like this one. In a jaded epoch of pretentiousness and cookie-cutter déjà vu, a humongous, sprawling, romantic, action-packed epic (bring ’em on!) about earth’s last untamed frontier, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, was, I bargained, just what the doctor ordered. Alas, it is my sad duty to report that even the two prettiest people on the screen today can’t save this titanic turkey from dropping dead of exhaustion. Desperately in need of a pair of scissors at a running time (not much sprawl, but lots of crawl) of almost three hours, Australia is one of the most boring movies ever made, and one of the corniest. Bring bottled water, No-Doze, a sandwich and a clean change of underwear.

Time:

Have you seen everything Australia has on offer a dozen times before? Sure you have. It's a movie less created by director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann than assembled, Dr. Frankenstein-style, from the leftover body parts of earlier movies. Which leaves us asking this question: How come it is so damnably entertaining?

The Village Voice:

That said, you'd need a heart of stone to resist the enchanting little boy, Nullah (wonderfully played by newcomer Brandon Walters), the offspring of a white man and an Aboriginal mother, who drives the magical-realist subtext of Australia and its generously inclusive and forgiving vision. (Luhrmann allegedly shot three endings to the movie, and it feels as though they all made the cut.) I can picture hard-core haters of the colonial oppressor rolling their eyes at Nullah's farewell line, "I'll sing you to me, Mrs. Boss." But a little conciliation goes a long way these days, and I freely confess to being almost as undone by the ending of Australia as I was by the climax of that other post-colonial feel-good movie of the year, Slumdog Millionaire.

NPR:

Luhrmann is a lover of artifice and excess; he's got no use for old-school realism, and he brings an unapologetically over-the-top aesthetic to the table. Here, he also wanted to make a deeply Australian film, to bend the norms of Hollywood filmmaking to the task of telling the story of his own country his own way.

Rolling Stone:

Luhrmann, the visual master behind Moulin Rouge!, cannot compose an ugly shot. But beautiful scenery and the best intentions can't save Australia from dissolving in goo.

The New Republic:

Which brings us to Australia. As in all your films, there are a lot of likable elements (as in most of them, often too many at once). There's music and humor and action and romance and loopy camera work and nostalgic nods to the popular music and cinema of the past. ("Oz" being a common nickname for Australia, we get to hear "Over the Rainbow" a lot.) But what might have worked as a buoyant throwback adventure yarn is instead weighted down with historical baggage, racial sermonizing, and, yes, frequent eruptions of tragedy.

The A.V. Club:

Australia hurries to get nowhere, finding and losing momentum amidst the jutting cliffs and endless plains. Only one sequence, a long cattle drive through harsh terrain, works on its own terms. The rest alternates earnest grappling with Australia's troubled racial history, half-earned mysticism, and a surprisingly perfunctory romance between Jackman—charming as an Outback-sculpted man in his element—and Kidman, who never quite loses the cartoon Katharine Hepburn veneer of her character's first appearance. It almost goes without saying that the film looks gorgeous, but the filmmaking behind it feels unsure how to work on this grand a scale. Australia is big. But it never fills the screen.

Variety:

Embracing grand old-school melodrama while critiquing racist old-fashioned politics, Baz Luhrmann's grandiose "Australia" provides a luxurious bumpy ride; like a Rolls-Royce on a rocky country road, it's full of bounces and lurches, but you can't really complain about the seat. Deliberately anachronistic in its heightened style of romance, villainy and destiny, the epic lays an Aussie accent on colorful motifs drawn from Hollywood Westerns, war films, love stories and socially conscious dramas. Some of it plays, some doesn't, and it is long. But the beauty of the film's stars and landscapes, the appeal of the central young boy and, perhaps more than anything, the filmmaker's eagerness to please tend to prevail, making for a film general audiences should go with, even if they're not swept away. Robust, but not boffo, box office looks in store.

'Australia' opens today in wide release.

Slate:

Quantum of Solace (Columbia Pictures), the 22nd James Bond film since 1962 and the second starring Daniel Craig, occupies an uneasy place in the 007 canon. The novelty of Craig's decidedly unsuave take on the British superspy has worn off, though we're still eager to see where he'll take the character. And now that the audience has adjusted to the notion of Bond as a tormented brute, we're starting to remember what drew us to this series in the first place: exotic locations, nifty surveillance technology, creative villains, and babes with ridiculous names. In short, we're drawn by fantasy, pleasure, and fun, none of which figures on the to-do list of the new James Bond nor of the movie's director, Marc Forster.

Newsweek:

"Quantum of Solace" isn't frivolous or cheesy, but it isn't all that much fun either. Craig is still the right guy for the job, but for his boiling-on-the-inside performance to work, he needs more to play with. He's doing a dark character study in a movie that rarely stops to catch its breath. Couldn't he have been allowed a little of the superspy's rakish charm?

Premiere:

Forget all the lukewarm reviews you've already read and the British press' collective whining over the fact that this Bond's got too much action, because Quantum of Solace is the finest installment in the storied franchise's 22-film history. Spring boarding from his art house pedigree and using his love for classic Bond titles From Russia With Love and Goldfinger as inspiration, director Marc Forster has crafted a stylish 007 adventure that's both brutal and light on its feet.

Chicago Tribune:

Compared with "Casino Royale," " Quantum of Solace" is a disappointment. Craig anchors it, and Judi Dench's M enjoys some fine, stern scenes, but director Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland," "Monster's Ball," "The Kite Runner") isn't much of an action man. There's plenty, but half the time it's visually incoherent. A minute past the (drab) opening credits, a superhumanly implacable Craig is careening through a snaky Italian tunnel, pursued by enemy agents with vehicular or machine-gun homicide on their minds. Simple premise. Oldie but goodie. Yet the way it's shot and cut, it plays like a parody of a car commercial shot in the style of a Bond film.

USA Today:

Craig and his piercing gaze still mesmerize, but the thriller credibility is disappointing after the topnotch Royale.

Where the film should be lively, it's frenetic, sometimes so furiously paced that key plot details can be easily missed amid the whiplash editing. It's as if director Marc Forster (The Kite Runner) didn't so much study Casino as try to pull off another Bourne movie.

The Los Angeles Times:

Outside of its title, "Quantum of Solace" offers little solace for fans of the venerable James Bond franchise. All dressed up with no particular place to go, this 22nd Bond film tries hard but ends up an underachiever. That's especially disappointing because several of the key players, including star Daniel Craig, have returned from the last Bond film, 2006's "Casino Royale," which seemed like such a promising retooling of the antediluvian franchise that dates all the way back to "Dr. No" in 1962. Also back is the traditional Bond emphasis on exotic locales — "Quantum" was shot in six countries, apparently a franchise record — and forceful action. According to the press notes, more than 200,000 rounds of blank ammunition were purchased for the film and 54 controlled explosions were set off for the finale, but not even all this bang is enough to secure our interest. For while star Craig, screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade along with Paul Haggis, and stunt coordinator Gary Powell, among others, are unchanged, the film's director — and its direction — have been altered, and that has made a difference. For the first time, a Bond film has been envisioned as a pure sequel, with Craig's Agent 007 ferociously fixated on getting revenge for the death of the woman he loved, the languid and treacherous Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green, who did not make it to the closing credits of "Casino Royale."

The New Yorker:

The narrative of Forster's film is certainly sketchy enough, and early viewers reported a dismaying sense of desiccation: no quips, no gadgets, no time to relax. For the aerial dogfight, both planes have propellers, as if Bond were just a throwback to Indiana Jones. He should wear Savile Row suits, but the costume designer puts him in a black blouson and flat-fronted cream chinos, like a slightly precious soccer fan. As for sex, you might as well stay home with a pair of bed socks and a DVD of "Alvin and the Chipmunks." Bond finds a beauteous comrade-in-arms, Camille (Olga Kurylenko), but she, it turns out, has her own agenda of revenge, and their sole point of contact is the kind of kiss that tennis partners exchange when they win a mixed doubles. I was cheered by the arrival of Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), an upstanding British redhead, but, after showing Bond her raincoat and her naked back, in that order, she makes an alarming exit. Why, then, days after seeing "Quantum of Solace," do I find, against expectation, that I can't shake it off? Given that it seems such a diminution of the Bond legend, boiling him down to the bare bones of aggression, what can it bring to the party<./blockquote>

Variety:

Stripped of "Royale's" humor, elegance and reinvented old-school stylishness, "Quantum" has little left except its plot, which is rudimentary and slightly barmy, in the line of the Roger Moore pics of the '70s and '80s.

Craig, physically fine as a human killing machine but stripped here of any humor or warmth, doesn't generate any onscreen heat with his putative femme lead, Kurylenko, who most of the time looks as if she's wandered onto the set of the wrong film. The distaff side briefly livens up with an extended cameo by Gemma Arterton, as an MI6 agent in Bolivia, who recalls perky Bond women of the ''60s.

Salon:

Craig is the scrappiest of all Bonds, but he's also the most tender. And "Quantum of Solace" is best when director Marc Forster allows his star the latitude to explore emotions that, until Craig stepped into the shoes of the character, we didn't know Bond had. In fact, "Quantum of Solace" contains one of the most moving sequences I've seen in any Bond movie — including the devastating ending of "Casino Royale" — an emotionally exquisite Pietà that's the kind of thing you get when you allow your actors to carry a scene quietly and instinctively.

Washington Post:

It's in Haiti that Bond meets Camille (the ravishing Olga Kurylenko), who has her own issues to work out. As the "Quantum of Solace" producers proudly proclaim in their promotional literature, Camille is the first Bond girl that James doesn't sleep with. Like that's a good thing.

From its hyper-edited, incoherent opening sequences to the dreary monotony of Bond's revenge kick, "Quantum of Solace" is one brutalizing bummer of a ride, a chain of increasingly explosive fight scenes strung together by bits of talky exposition. Even the locations, long part of the lush vicarious enjoyment to be had at a James Bond movie, have no zing.

The New Republic:

Under other circumstances, I wouldn't applaud the surfeit of brutality—which still doesn't approach what you can find elsewhere at the multiplex most nights—but, as in Casino Royale, it is a useful corrective to the flabby excesses of the franchise, which so often portrayed 007 as ass-chaser first and assassin second. Moreover, Craig is so very good as the hitman with a heart of lead that it's hard to begrudge him his lethal mandate. His blue eyes are colder than even Fleming could've imagined, and his spare but fearsome frame seems, unlike most Hollywood physiques, built more for performance than for show. (Most of the women I know will be disappointed—and most of their husbands relieved—to hear that Craig takes his shirt off a good deal less than he did in Casino Royale.)

Apart from Craig, the chief pleasure of the film is Dame Judi Dench. In her earlier collaborations with Brosnan, I could never shake the sense that she was holding back a bit, lest the quiet domination of which she (and sometimes it seems only she) is capable might overwhelm her leading man and throw their scenes together out of kilter. Craig, by contrast, can and does withstand the full-on Dench, and their scenes together crackle with amiable ferocity. Who needs Bond Girls when this Bond Woman is so much more compelling?

The New York Times:

The death in “Casino” of Bond’s lover Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), along with the possibility that she had betrayed him before dying, provides an obvious psychological explanation for his somber demeanor in “Quantum.” But while the exploration of Bond’s psychology makes him, arguably at least, a deeper, subtler character — and there is certainly impressive depth and subtlety in Mr. Craig’s wounded, whispery menace — it also makes him harder to distinguish from every other grieving, seething avenger at the multiplex.

Which is to say just about every one. And here, I suppose, the deeper questions bubble up. Is revenge the only possible motive for large-scale movie heroism these days? Does every hero, whether Batman or Jason Bourne, need to be so sad?

'Quantum of Solace' opens today in movie theaters nationwide.

• Meanwhile, an expert on veteran mental health says that the medical community needs to come up with an effective response to domestic violence cases that involve the growing number of abusers that are veterans with PTSD. • After bad publicity over their backlog of untested rape kits, the LAPD announced a plan to seek funding to reduce its "massive backlog" of unexamined DNA evidence from violent crimes. • Carol's Daughter, a beauty brand marketed to African American women, is suing Carol's Express and its distributor, CVS, over trademark infringement. • Facebook removed a group titled "Dead Babies Make Me Laugh" which was based on those boring jokes about dead babies that dumb people tell. • Female gymnasts can avoid worsening wrist injuries, the most common injury for female athletes, by seeking quick treatment and assessment even if they feel a low level of wrist pain after an injury. • Good news for migraine sufferers: A new study claims that women who suffer from migraines have a significantly lower risk of getting breast cancer. • A Norwegian management researcher has found that leaders that displayed both feminine and masculine traits were the best at creating a climate of innovation. • The Lifetime network is currently developing a biopic about Georgia O'Keeffe starring Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons. •

Our story begins in Ancient Rome. Or the place where they built Barack Obama's DNC speech set.

Our heroine sits, contemplating her perfectly Botoxed face in a mirror whilst keeping a firm grip on her Prada purse. Her "Shadow" lurks in the background, as the help is supposed to do.

"Did I overdo it with the injectables?" she wonders.

Fed up with the self-absorption disguised as self-reflection, The Shadow flees.

The Shadow wanders the streets of the deserted city. Not a soul to be found. Damn stock market crash.

The Shadow comes upon a young child near an aquarium. As with all little girls in movies, this child may or may not be Dakota Fanning.

Somehow, The Shadow ends up in the water. Friggin kids.

Then the shadow turns into a child.

Or does she? It is but a reflection in a well-appointed dressing room.

Ah, here is The Shadow. Veiled. Did someone die? Is The Shadow mourning the death of childhood?

The Shadow ditches her flowers and leaves the church.

Out in the courtyard, The Shadow meets a rawther large compass. They dance.

Back at the manse, the Lady of the house has yet to notice something is awry. Note that (DUM DUM DUM!) her Prada bag is missing.

The Shadow returns from her adventures; The Lady embraces her.

The Shadow returns to her seat in the back. The Lady's purse has magically reappeared. All is at it was in the beginning. All's well that ends well.

Moral Of The Story: Keep your eye on your Prada bag when shady characters are afoot.

Prada’s New Animated Short Film for Fall 2008 [The Frisky]
Fallen Shadows [Prada]
Earlier: Let's All Take Acid And Watch The New Prada Movie