‘French Exit’ Review: Michelle Pfeiffer Makes a Clean Break, Delivering the Role for Which She’ll Be Remembered

Frances Price married well, if one’s notion of success in that department is defined more by financial comfort than by romance.

Her marriage wasn’t so much loveless as moneyful, and that arguably works out better for the wealthy Manhattan wife Michelle Pfeiffer so memorably embodies in Azazel Jacobs’ “French Exit,” a sophisticated closing night choice for this year’s virtual-hybrid New York Film Festival, which “The Sisters Brothers” author Patrick deWitt adapted from his own novel.After the death of her husband — whose corpse she left to rot for several days, giving herself time to take a short ski vacation in Vail, before reporting it to the authorities — Frances pulled her son, Malcolm, out of boarding school, drove him home in her silver Rolls-Royce, and decided to express an interest in his life.

“Did you drink to the brink of sound reasoning?” she queries her son (now a

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