Kritiken

While the plot of Série Noire might sound quite bleak, the film is actually shockingly funny, with a rich streak of pitch-black humor running through it. Much of that is because of Dewaere’s wickedly wild performance as Poupart... A satisfying slice of sleaze served up on celluloid, Série Noire is a deliciously good watch.

An enticingly nasty little crime film in which all pleasures go sour before they can be enjoyed, [Serie Noire] is ripe for rediscovery... and will be many [people's] first encounter with star Patrick Dewaere, whose funny, bracingly strange turn here was among his last.

Patrick Dewaere was one of the best actors to grace the screen in the 1970s and early 1980s, bringing an air of enigmatic melancholy to a wide range of films. . . . Dewaere is not only melancholy but hapless and coolly amoral—in short, a fascinating specimen of film noir masculinity.

The film’s greatest achievement as a monumentally misanthropic film noir is embracing Thompson’s playful sense of spite and encouraging the viewer to laugh with Franck as he jokes about the stupidity of everyone around him and the insanity of the untenable situation that he keeps willfully throwing himself further into.

[Serie Noire] takes itself much too seriously, as is the way with humorless French adapters of American fiction of this sort. There is material here maybe for Claude Chabrol or even Francois Truffaut, but evidently not for Mr. Corneau.