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Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The acting in this movie is really good.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

In "L'adversaire" we have probably one of the best French actors of his generation.Daniel Auteuil could be compared to Dustin Hoffman in many ways with great depths in his acting. Any character from Ugolin in "Jean de Florette", (Claude Berri's masterpiece), a simple minded crop farmer in the deep south. To this horrendous father and husband capable of the unbearable, unthinkable and terrifying act. But by way of some incredible acting, Daniel Auteuil never the less manages to give this gruesome character a humane nearly touching side, as he strives not to drown under the burden of his life long lie. I must admit that the film shattered me and I felt quite nauseated. It could only have been made by a women like Nicole Garcia, only her talent could deal with a subject such as this one and come out with a film that succeeds in pinning you to your seat, no matter how much you would like to look away, without turning it into a horror film. In a way this film has a certain Hitchcock feel to it.

I saw L'Adversaire last night (20 Aug 07), and I'm still trying to sort it out. It's very disturbing, possibly because it's based on a true story (an UNBELIEVABLY real and devastatingly true story; as the old saw has it, you couldn't make this stuff up). Director Nicole Garcia has apparently decided to present the truth, more or less, as it happened. She has done a wonderful job with material written by her son, Frederic Belier-Garcia, and Emmanuel Carrere, upon whose novel the film is based. This must have been very difficult to transpose to the screen -- the subject matter requires a bombardment of raw, visceral emotions. L'Adversaire is based on the sensational 1993 French murder case involving Jean-Claude Romand, who murdered his wife, two children and his parents before attempting suicide himself. After almost two decades of blatant deceit (not a mere 15 years as shown in the film), he was about to bring shame on everyone, most of all upon himself. Rather than face the inevitable, he commits the atrocities. Romand was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996.Everyone close to him believes that the cinematic Romand -- Jean-Marc Faure (Daniel Auteuil) -- is a medical doctor at the World Health Organization (a UN agency) in Geneva. He doesn't work there at all -- he isn't even a doctor. He hangs around the WHO halls, briefcase in hand, a haunted, sad, lonely man; he pops in on occasional conferences; he sleeps, listens to his car radio, giggles, reads newspapers, eats, and then, after his 'full day,' he goes home to his wife and two children. He carries on this fiction for 15 long years, financing it on 'donations' from family and friends who believe Faure is investing their money for handsome returns.The days of reckoning come, as they must, and Faure begins to implode. What follows is a minimalist excursion into terror, but with an important caveat: there's very little blood. The viewer fills in the killing scenes, which, as Hitchcock knew so well, is always more frightening.Daniel Auteuil as Faure is perfect. This is a difficult performance -- how does the viewer empathize with such an ostensible monster? And yet we do, based on Auteuil's performance. He emerges as a pathetic, tortured man who adopts his elaborate NON-lifestyle early, as a 'stop-gap' perhaps. But the years zip by and he finds himself in so deeply that he cannot extricate himself. After seeing Auteuil's magnificent Gallic face twist and turn into 100 degrees of irony, desperation, joy, and pain, you're left to conclude that no other French actor alive could play this part, unless it would be Aurelien Recoing. He superbly played a stunning similar role (without the murders) in L'Emploi du temps (Time Out), which was released in 2001, a year before L'Adversaire. The lovely Geraldine Pailhas as Faure's bewildered and long-suffering wife doesn't have very much to do, but she brings shining femininity to her part. Emmanuelle Devos is, as usual, outstanding as Faure's flighty girlfriend.The film has a few problems: there's a bumpy, fuzzy beginning, and the flashbacks are disruptive and often confusing. Auteuil was 52 years old when he made the film, too old for a man who left medical school (a drop-out) only 15 years before. And we're left with a big question at the end: did he live or die? If you didn't know the real story of Jean-Claude Romand, that lingers as a loose end with the viewer. Despite these deficiencies, it really doesn't matter. This is just a very disturbing REAL story -- Sartrean nothingness, existentialism brought to life -- the 'non-person,' the artificial human being who lives a titanic lie for a very long time and gets away with it. No one really seems to notice, which tells us a lot about our own sense of self-absorption. This film is very dark, but it couldn't be anything else. We are looking into the face of hell, an assault of demons, through the eyes of Auteuil. L'Adversaire is a splendid exploration of that part of all of us that is afflicted by deviant behaviour. We all deceive, we all lie; it's just a matter of how far we are willing to take it.

SPOILER: Once in a while you come across a movie about which you know from the first moment on what has happened and still you aren't able to turn it off or to switch to another channel. You keep watching, because you want to know everything about it. Why that is, I don't know, but I find it very intriguing and I guess it only proves the quality of these movies."L'Adversaire" or "The Adversary" is such a movie. From the first moment on you know that Daniel Auteuil's character Jean-Marc Faure has done something terrible to his family. You know he has murdered his wife and children, but you don't know why. Only when you keep watching until the end you'll see that the man has been living a lie for the past twenty years and that he wasn't able anymore to continue like that. He had made everybody believe that he was a successful doctor, working for a prestigious medical institution. Next to his 'dayjob' he also invested money for his friends and relatives, which in reality he used to live on, buying his family more expensive homes and cars, and sustaining a young mistress for himself. But eventually people wanted to see some returns on their investments or wanted to withdraw large sums that he couldn't possibly give them. So he kept stalling and putting them off until he ran totally out of options and his whole world came crashing down ... resulting in his final, chilling act of desperation.What perhaps is even the most chilling thing about this movie is that it has been based on true events. Yes, if you turn on the news, you regularly get to hear news about a father who has murdered his entire family because they were in big financial problems, but it is never shown in so much detail as it is in this movie. In this movie you get to see, thanks to a complex series of flashbacks, the investigation after the murder, showing how he starts getting into trouble until he has only one option left. I'm pretty sure that a lot of people had to swallow a couple of times when seeing it all and I admit that I was one of them.Next to the chilling story, the acting is something else that deserves noticing. I'm not very familiar with these actors, but they all did a nice job. Especially Daniel Auteuil (the only actor that I have heard of before), who is absolutely terrific. He has managed to help you understand why the man did it, without saying that what the man did was right or wrong. I'm not saying that you'll like the man, but you'll understand him and that's something very special for a movie like this one. All in all this is some very powerful cinema like you don't get to see it very often. Even if you aren't too familiar with the director or with the actors, even when you aren't used to watch foreign movies, you still should give this one a try. It certainly deserves it. I reward this movie with an 8/10.

Excellent performance by Daniel Auteuil; very inspired and gentle music; The image is great, too. But one should ask himself : Why? Why make a movie about someone who suffers senslessly his entire life, and eventualy kills his whole family because of his insanity .. Is it worth seeing? Well I guess you'll have to figure out the answer for yourself. But even with enough popcorn for 3 hours, one should never waist 2 hours of his precious life.