Inspector Bellamy unfolds as a conflation of moral meditation, romantic resolution and cinematic creativity. It's a shot of late-career virility for a director now ranked among the dearly departed. With the inimitable Gerard Depardieu as the titular Bellamy, Chabrol's final film boasts as much innovation and formal imagination as could be expected of a man crucial to a key movement in film history. With the similarly philosophical Revanche and Everyone Else, it would form a hell of a triptych.

A cops-and-robbers story that possesses a number of peculiarly French virtues: the good guys aren't necessarily so good, the bad guys not necessarily so bad, nobody finds much time for gunfights or machismo, and in general this movie is every bit about how much the cop loves his wife and hates his ne'er-do-well brother as it is about the crime and its investigation. This American finds this approach refreshing. It's also nice to see Depardieu still such a commanding presence at 60

Run-of-the-mill French talkie which is marred by a couple of poor casting decisions (not Depardieu or Bunel, who are both good). Works better as a character study than a detective story; either way, a fairly forgettable film.

Chabrol re-imagines the detective genre in the course of practicing it.

"The death of Claude Chabrol inevitably saddles Inspector Bellamy, the prolific French New Waver's final feature, with a coda-status heft that the wispy opus cannot possibly shoulder." - Fernando F. Croce