This may strike some as heresy, but Arnaud Desplechin's whirling portrait of a tension-cracked familial get-together resonated with me in ways Wes Anderson's beloved The Royal Tenenbaums never did. (A dollhouse figures in one of the storylines, but the emotional barbs keep spilling over instead of being set-designed into submission.) With the matriarch (Catherine Deneuve) stricken with cancer, the fuck-up middle brother (Mathieu Amalric) returning home after being "banished" by the older sister (Anne Consigny), and one of the youngsters still shaken from a suicide attempt, it's a Yuletide gathering scarcely starving for drama. There are overlapping fights, secrets and reunions, yet despite the hanging pall of mortality, the film's mood is mainly exhilarating, with Desplechin's love for the characters compounded by his joyously eclectic filmmaking (woven in are irises, shadow puppetry, split-screens, and—why not?—an out-of-nowhere Vertigo reference). Madly but invigoratingly uneven; if the movie refuses to fuse into a whole (Desplechin seems to be spinning a few too many plates), its emotions still scintillate.  Fernando F. Croce