Critics reviews

Most of Amalric's work is hard to find in the US. What's kept On Tour, for which he picked up best director at Cannes, away from these shores is one of the greatest soundtracks of the modern era... Amalric's Francophone 8½ homage gives every ounce of compositional pleasure and honest emotion to its vision of a unified artistic tomorrow. The boozy, depressive journey is the destination and it's a rare one, not to be missed.

The picture is bawdy and salacious in places, as you'd expect. But what gets you in the end, thanks to Amalric's silky-oily performance and surefooted direction, is its wistful tenderness.

A likably rambling survey of ephemeral community, a portrait of the artist as washed-up family man and pimp, and a quasi-documentary about brassy stage personas, Amalric's film also functions as a reminder of the festival's interest in works that venture behind the curtains of spectacle.

The result, delivered in a mix of English and French, feels lived in, charming, touching and spiky, if somewhat rambling. There's a strong sense of the tour as work – bland hotels, travel co-ordination, Muzak – as well as the situation's propensity to let cooped-up emotions, from anger to lust, marinate.

While On Tour settles a little too easily in conclusion for the troupe-as-one-big-family cliché, and Amalric still looks rather too boyish to bring off the grizzled weariness necessary to make Zand completely believable, the film's engaging confidence and inclusive good nature prove he's worth watching both as an actor and a director.

Tournée is quite easily one of the year's best, and shows a huge amount of potential for Amalric's directorial career. His hand is sure, and his passion for the material is infused in every frame. The film manages to be consistently surprisingly, offering some of the year's most memorable images and laughs. So far, it is the film to beat.

neurotic intensity on-screen is counterbalanced by his gregariousness off, which extends beyond his obvious affection for the brassy dames to an effortless naturalism that encompasses crackerjack French dialogue and improvisations in English, surrealist gestures and theatrical flourishes.

The film just isn't as strong when not mining vibrantly weird humor out of eclectic circumstances: A tableau shot of a pissed-off airline pilot at an elevator bank gets big laughs as he sizes up Joachim, but not as many as when the latter hands his cell phone to one of his boys to explain to the person on the other end of the line who Jules Verne is.

...This is all enough to dislodge and leave floating the unsatisfying moral character development of Amalric's lead, and instead keeps memorable the subvert-and-diverting American girls whose very presence pleasurably prevents satisfactory completion of a very average tale.

Melancholy and meandering, this drama with comic touches doesn't live up to the brassiness misleadingly promised in the neon-styled opening credits, and viewers expecting feelgood raunch may be disappointed by the tone of [the film]. For all its relaxed idiosyncrasy, On Tour doesn't suggest as strong a personality behind the camera as in front of it, and Amalric's appeal as a director - this is his fourth feature - is yet to prove itself commercially.

Amalric has clearly learned a lot working with such masters of glancing emotion as Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas, and there are a number of individual scenes in On Tour so arresting and exquisite that they could easily veer off into potentially terrific movies of their own... Trouble is, Amalric is so detail-oriented that the big picture tends to escape him, even as he beats "we are fam-i-lee" into the dirt.

On Tour remains a largely pleasurable experience thanks to Amalric's firm grasp of moments and incidental details. As in his acting, Amalric shows a predilection for the eccentric aside, little bits of business that seem like goofy throwaways but still ring true and enhance the film's lived-in texture. Moment to moment, On Tour is consistently amusing and well-observed.