OSS 117: Lost in Rio

Set in Rio in 1967, this sends French agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath after a microfilm listing Nazi collaborators. The Israeli army officer forced to work with him grows less able to tolerate his worldview with every scene. That is the whole joke: the hero is too certain of himself to notice his own racism and misogyny. Jean Dujardin plays the part for the second time after OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies in 2006. Michel Hazanavicius's method here is the one he took into The Artist: period imitation, executed exactly. The pastiche is meticulous. Deliberately clumsy rear projection in the driving scenes, the multi-dynamic image technique popularised by The Thomas Crown Affair, and nods to early Bond and to Hitchcock. Against a 23.4 million euro budget it grossed 21.9 million dollars, though it opened to a bigger audience than its predecessor. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 75 percent and Metacritic at 58. Who it is for: viewers who like spy parody and sixties visual language. Who it is not for: anyone who struggles to read the hero's lines as irony. The film leaves that distance for the audience to build.