Swimming Pool: Critic Reviews

The narrative logic of Swimming Pool slips through our hands like cool water, shimmery and light-dappled, leaving behind the pleasures of summer heat and goose bumps.

Mr. Ozon's first English-language film, is simultaneously a thoroughly mannered, mischievously artificial confection and an acute piece of psychological realism.

With a little sex, some mystery, a little sex, an appealing title and a little sex, France's Swimming Pool has what it takes to become an art house audience magnet.

A watchable, provocative film.

[The tension] grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

Swimming Pool is a lark of a thriller, and a mesmerizing one at that.

Swimming Pool is as lulling as a dead man's float, but you come up for air realizing there's no deep end.

Whether the movie leaves you confused or angry, you will be stimulated to long discussion afterward. How often does that happen these days?

Ozon takes a long time setting up his story, but the interplay between Sagnier and Rampling is electric.

Works as a character study and a quiet thriller.

In taking one sort of movie and seemingly teasing it into another, the director and his leading ladies have made a lovely argument about where the real mysteries lie in our lives.

Sensuous and deceptive.

A fine sunlit noir, oozing sensuality and menace.

Rampling and Sagnier are very good in roles that demand very different things of them, and Ozon's mix of peril and playfulness make for a seductive cinematic diversion.

Offers an inside-out twist on TV's Murder She Wrote.

The story occasionally wanders, but Swimming Pool is definitely worth a dip.

Two parts psychological thriller and one part pretentious French art-house head-scratcher that leaves you mumbling, 'Duh.'

Swimming Pool is more an exquisite art object than an involving movie. So be it.

A brace of superb performances elevates French writer-director Francois Ozon's first English-language movie.

Ozon simultaneously manages to make his film lazily sexual and crisply suspenseful.

Think of it as a box of chocolates, with Sagnier being the chocolate-covered cherry. And you know the problem with chocolates: They're great to eat but they offer no nourishment whatsoever, and afterwards you feel guilty for the indulgence.

Well-acted, nicely shot, slick and certainly sexy, Swimming Pool may be all foreplay and no climax, but what the heck -- there are worse ways to be teased.

Like other Ozon movies, it feels lifeless and freeze-dried -- in the end, it's more about its own ideas than it is about actual characters.

Swimming Pool seduces and annoys.