As pretty a movie as you could ever want to see -- perhaps an odd claim to make for one confined for almost its entire length to a police-station interrogation room. But because of that very confinement, director Claude Miller, his photographer, and his set designer could concentrate on getting the look of the thing just so, lighting the set for maximum tactile appreciation of its various surfaces, making use of the New Year's Eve time-setting for sparse but effective decorative touches, and creating a glorious backdrop, outside rain-washed windows, of blurry city lights climbing up just so high in the gradually deepening purple of the sky. Once the visual design is taken care of, the movie becomes a heroic battle against staginess and stir-craziness, and every free-association flashback where we get a quick glimpse of what's being talked about in the present tense, every gratuitous closeup of an object, every subtle and mellifluous movement of the camera, every trip to the coffee machine or across the street to report to the police chief -- in sum, every little fidget -- becomes charged with a significance irrelevant to the child-rape and murder under investigation. The viewer need not have become quite so conscious of all this fidgetry, or quite so empathetically restless and nervous himself, if the contrived plotline, taken from a pulp thriller by John Wainwright, boasted the least little bit of freshness and ingenuity. Lino Ventura, Michel Serrault, Romy Schneider. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd