Many other great comprehensive reviews on here, but I will give it a try. This will be somewhat disjointed and a simple review. Movie started out lovely; beautiful Paris with the light and colors and excellent filming. All the actors did well. Now for the plot. Michael Caine starts off as a grieving, feeble old man with a cane tottering around Paris, and somehow by about a third of the way in, he is transformed into a line dancer and snappy dresser. After his children arrive, he turns into a rather nasty, selfish piece of work. I got the impression that I was supposed to find fault with his children, but kept wondering why, since obviously it was the father and mother who left the children behind in America at some point. When and why and how did they come to leave America and have two residences in France is never explained. And why is Michael Caine an American? Another puzzling item. By the last quarter of the film, Michael Caine is no longer feeble, and in fact it seems he might be thinking of becoming romantically (sex) involved with the female lead, since he is very polished up and taking her to expensive dinners and saying things lover say. I don't want to spoil anything, so I will leave it at this. Overall, a movie with a lot of questions as to the logic of situations, but no answers. I don't know if what I have written qualifies as a spoiler, so I said it was, just in case.

Matthew (Michael Caine) is a widower in Paris... has lived there for years, but has never learned the language. Disgraceful. Now he must start to get out and about and meet the people. He keeps bumping into dance instructor Pauline (Clémence Poésy). They seem to hit it off on some level, and they spend time together, at least for the time being. Matthew keeps trying to knock himself off, but we're not sure why. His son Miles ( Justin Kirk) and daughter (Gillian Anderson !!) show up, and they aren't sure what to make of Dad's friendship with Pauline. Family dynamics. Miles thinks he knows what's best for Dad and butts heads with both Matthew and Pauline. Lots of family conflict. Good stuff. Directed by Sandra Nettelbeck, who has written and directed several projects. Story by Françoise Dorner, une actress/directeur françoise. Moves kind of slow and bleak, for the last part of the story, but it is what it is. Interesting study of family relationships. Showing on netflix. No car chases, no gunfights. Michael Caine is good stuff.

Rented this one for Mom and proud to have lasted to the end. What a depressing nap of a film. You can tell it is adopted from a European book because it is SLOW and it is SAD. Caine is at the end of his life as he meets Poesy, a beautiful dancer who is full of life. His family is a weight on his neck. She helps him deal with that weight before his time runs out. His kids come to visit when his health starts to fail and they are monsters. Just awful, little people. They are so caught up in their twisted, broken little lives and their dependencies, they don't have time for their father except to make sure they are in his will. Sad, tired little movie that saps your strength and glow. SKIP THIS

For some reason, Michael Caine was chosen to play an American old man living in France. He is devastated by the death of his wife and can't cope with it. He contemplates suicide when he meets an interesting and very young French girl who breathes some life in his routine driven drab excuse for an existence. He tries to commit suicide and fails, making his son and daughter to come visiting. The French girl wants to fix everyone's problems, including her daddy and family issues.Up to this point, the actors were well fleshed out, the acting good and the mood, even if boring sometimes, was interesting, feeling like something one might learn from. But towards the end Caine's character becomes more and more erratic. Far from a lovable old man and a great father, the script is trying to force him to become one with the other characters inexplicably making huge efforts to fix him. The ending is inexplicable as well, mostly because after all that effort, it seems really wasteful.Clémence Poésy is very cute, even Harry Potter thought so, and Michael Caine remains a good actor, even if he didn't seem at all the right choice for this role. And I believe this is the part where the movie fails completely: the casting. Caine as an American, with his clearly British accent and his demeanor, I am sad to say, that of an angry bully, not a sad old man as the role demanded, was a horrible choice. I can applaud Justin Kirk trying to not play a funny guy anymore, but you do that in a movie where everybody else is well cast. As such, he was also a weird choice. And Gillian Anderson playing very well her role, I think it was actually right for her, but her character has a few scenes and then goes away.Bottom line: the ending and the casting make this film a failure, in my mind. Besides a few well acted emotional scenes that brought tears to my eyes and some others that seemed like they are going to teach me something about human nature, it turned out to be a bore. Also, the script seemed written somewhere in the past. No one used a cell phone? Really?!