Metacritic reviews

With the pitiless, devastating Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat puts men and women, boys and girls on notice: When fantasy, hypocrisy, and manipulation mix in a wet, sandy place, you dive into sex at your own risk.

It's a lean, mean movie, and not a pretty one, but it leaves no question as to Breillat's angular originality as a filmmaker.

As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.

Much more than a perfectly realized vignette about seduction. It is the latest and most powerful dispatch yet from Ms. Breillat, France's most impassioned correspondent covering the war between the sexes.

It's sensuality with a stinger, and Fat Girl is an adolescent sex drama that takes no prisoners.

The film's concluding sequence is bound to polarize audiences.

Breillat has made an important, even essential work about the exploitation of young women's sexuality, but is not she complicit as well?

This disturbing drama has many telling moments, but it ends with an out-of-the-blue shock episode that raises more questions than it answers.

The shocking, ambiguous ending might have been better served by the film's original, ambiguous title, "To My Sister."

Uncompromising and unforgiving, but ultimately more self-destructive than any of its characters.