Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

The Woman Next Door (1981)

Director: François Truffaut

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

For all the period charm of his historical pieces - from Jules and Jim to The Last Métro - Truffaut increasingly looks more comfortable with contemporary domestic dramas drawn from the bourgeois milieu so successfully explored by Chabrol in the early '70s. In this context, The Woman Next Door recounts its tale of amour fou in a provincial town - Depardieu (plus wife and kid) moves in next door to a newly-married woman (Ardant) with whom he had an obsessional affair eight years earlier - with absolute narrative confidence. But as Truffaut steers his audience towards the tragic dénouement, the effect is a curiously passive experience, as if, like passengers on a bus tour, we are offered a scenic excursion without ever being driven to the precipice from which his protagonists will fall. A long way from Hitchcock (and Chabrol), but a consistently watchable sub-thriller none the less.

Author: MA 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: François Truffaut

Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Henri Garcin, Michèle Baumgartner, Véronique Silver full cast

Genre(s): Thrillers

Duration: 106 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.