"Don't let the title mislead you: Détective is hard-boiled melodrama in name only. With a scrambled thriller plot, it's strictly a shaggy-dick flick. But its shagginess and even its sardonic gloominess are part of its quirky charm. In Détective, Godard returns to the brass-knuckles fiction of his younger years to see if he can extract some lasting truths from it....The film is full of political wisecracks and classical music, movie quotes and book quotes....Détective is perverse and arbitrary-but that helps make it a warts-and-all reflection of Godard...unified by feelings of nostalgia, resignation and despair. It's a Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man....You could label the narrative 'Front Window': in a whimsically run hotel, an unholy trio of menages...work out their mysterious relations under the eyes (and the cameras) of a former hotel detective (assisted by) his sleuthing nephew....Godard's imagery has rarely been more elegant and concise (and) this film about faded passions and failure is gorgeously colored."-Michael Sragow, Examiner