Weekend Movie Forecast: The Hurt Locker Vs. Transformers

Director Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, The Queen) is back with Chéri, which features a screenplay written by Frears's Dangerous Liaisons scribe Christopher Hampton, adapted from two novels by Colette. Set in Paris pre-WWI, the movie concerns a stormy romance between young Chéri (Rupert Friend) and a retired courtesan Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer). The trouble starts when Chéri’s mother (Kathy Bates), a rival of Léa, plots to separate the pair by arranging a marriage between her son and Edmée (Felicity Jones). Salon's Stephanie Zacharek says it's "a perfect example of a movie that gets many of the details right and the vibe all wrong. Despite the movie's lavish trappings (and the fact that it was filmed on location in France), Chéri is all efficiency and no luxury. It clicks along like clockwork when it needs to be languorous... The whole enterprise is far too jolly and jaunty, and while Colette's writing may be many things, 'jolly' and jaunty—at least in the English sense—it is not."