birck I DVR'd this film in spite of a two-star rating from Comcast, because I like Daniel Auteuil and Catherine DeNeuve. How bad could it be? I wasn't disappointed. It begins with a mystery-who killed the father of the cynical little kid? And slowly breaks open the story, revealing the characters as it reveals the criminal enterprise that brought them all together. Most of them-including the little kid-are not family-friendly. This isn't a family film. A cop who hates his brother and is in turn hated by their father, who tells him, face to face, that he would have preferred that the cop had been killed instead. The dead man's son seems to despise his entire family, including his mother, and his uncle, the cop. Who, in turn, doesn't like kids. The cop's girlfriend doesn't like him much, and he really doesn't want to deal with her except for sex. But as others have noted about this film on this forum, the director pulls out just enough unexpected gilded moments to make it enjoyable to watch-like: a middle-aged college professor delivering a 3-minute dissertation on the position of money in western philosophy to a professional car thief during a nighttime ride-as a passenger- through the streets of Lyon. At the car thief's request. That sort of theater of the Absurd approach is one thing I like about French films. They're dependable that way.

bilney-1 Sure, there were some good things about "Les Voleurs". And if it could have sustained its mood and its so-called plot up to the end of the film, I'd have given it more stars.It was interesting that almost all comments have been positive. I guess nobody noticed something rather obvious towards the conclusion, and if they had thought about it, they'd have understood why they were a bit baffled by the movie. The cast started baling out of the movie towards the end. Catherine Deneuve vanished. Her absence was explained by someone telling the hero that she had committed suicide. Off camera, no less, with no indication that that might happen. Then the young heroine, Deneuve's lover, disappeared. Where did she go? Oh yeah, someone mentioned that she'd gone to Marseilles. Oh really? I didn't notice her packing.So the director cleverly covered for them. Were his stars fed up? Was the shoot going overtime? Had the production run out of money? Anyway, finally he's left with the kid to come back to, the same one he opened the movie with. At least it gave him a couple of bookends, but what was between them was a plot with no satisfactory conclusion.Too bad. This could have been a fine movie, but it never got finished.Jelby, Victoria, B.C.

gridoon This film has a complex, multi-layered structure that grabs your interest...but not much substance underneath. There's no real mystery to the plot, and no real revelations about "human nature" either. Well-acted all around - including a little boy who is wise way beyond his years. (**)

George Parker "Thieves" has Techine at the helm with Deneuve and Auetuil in the spotlight and critical plaudits aplenty. However, my reaction at the end of the two hour flick was "Yeah, so???". Telling of the intertwined lives of a cop and his brother and a girl and her lover and a handful of other people, this character driven flick wanders to and fro interminably, jumping around in time, examining the details of their fatalistic and pragmatic lives as they fuss and stew and brood over the this and that of their existence. Given subtitles and a soup thin story with no moral, no message, no hero, no villain, just character study heaped upon character study and no character that's even likeable, "Thieves" will not have much appeal for the masses. Recommended for French speakers or French film buffs only. (B)