Where Dans Paris truly pops, besides its spot-on leads or the slick curation of its fashions and locales, are in its mood-mixing musical moments.

Besides the restless style, Dans Paris is remarkable for being more about familial bonds than French cinema tends to be.

Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors' lips.

Dans Paris is a cohesive, albeit sometimes creepy, fabric of disparate modes and colors.

Dans Paris provides a brooding, poetic echo - an after-dinner mint to a lasting meal.

There's a vivid comedy to this family's emotional state of siege, an easy confidence to Honoré's camerawork, and plenty of beautiful bodies.

Dans Paris makes the city seem like the ideal place to be clinically depressed.

Inside Paris is that rarity, a genuinely honest, unpretentious and delightful, small film, alternately sober and effervescent, steering clear of either heavy-going philosophizing or dreaded whimsy.

Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris is both a floppy, joyful tribute to the French New Wave and an inspired retelling of "Franny and Zooey."

This is a film for hardcore film fans and Francophiles. Everyone else may find little to sustain them beyond the pastiche and shots of Paris.

Dans Paris will delight aficionados familiar with its myriad references, and there's no denying the appeal of Duris and Garrel. But once the source of the boys' primal wound is revealed, the whole enterprise comes to feel as mechanical as the Bon Marche window display that serves as one of the film's plot points.

Make a movie about depressed people, and what do you get? A depressing movie.

Christophe Honoré collaborated with Anne-Sophie Birot on the script of her excellent "Girls Can't Swim," but left to his own devices, he seems like a relatively dull cousin of Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument).

Cliché, or experiment with cliché? Really, it's not worth sticking around to find out, since the action mostly involves the monotonous Romain Duris standing around in his underpants or sitting on the toilet banging on about why love has fled.