--- description: Find out why "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" is on TIME's list of the 50 most underappreciated movies of the 21st Century. title: 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped' Is on The 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta23668f31e9ec3d0/6998cd42a97fc0ecdaa750aa/Underappreciated-Movies-the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Feb 04, 2026 # _The Beat That My Heart Skipped_ Jacques Audiard by [Stephanie Zacharek](/author/stephanie-zacharek/) ## Stephanie Zacharek Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Film Critic  Romain Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, 2005. Romain Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, 2005.UGC Fox Distribution French filmmaker Jacques Audiard may be best known to modern American audiences as the director of 2024’s controversial musical-crime thriller [_Emelia Pérez_](https://time.com/7175205/emilia-perez-review-netflix/ "undefined"), but he’s been making movies for more than 30 years. Among the best of these is _The Beat That My Heart Skipped_, a brash, vital remake of James Toback’s 1978 thriller _Fingers,_ about a thug (played, in the earlier movie, by Harvey Keitel) who longs to be a concert pianist. Audiard puts his own stamp on the material. Romain Duris plays Tom, who’s struggling to escape the life of crime he’s been born into: his father, played by the French-Danish actor Niels Arestrup, has always been crooked, and often calls upon him to crack the bones (and heads) of deadbeat borrowers. Tom, who’s also involved in shady real estate deals, wants nothing more than to play classical piano; he yearns to be transformed by the beauty of art, but the brutality of his old life keeps calling him back. Duris, handsome in a brooding, surly way, is at first off-putting as Tom. But slowly, you come to feel something for him. His performance reveals increasingly complex layers, and in the end, he’s both the heart, and the fingers, of this bracingly unsentimental movie. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/50-most-underappreciated-movies/7353535/the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/50-most-underappreciated-movies/7353535/the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped/"},"headline":"The Beat That My Heart Skipped","datePublished":"2026-02-04T12:52:28.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-03T01:04:49.338Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/50-most-underappreciated-movies/7353535/the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped/","keywords":["movies"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta23668f31e9ec3d0/6998cd42a97fc0ecdaa750aa/Underappreciated-Movies-the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Stephanie Zacharek","jobTitle":"Film Critic","url":"https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/"}],"creator":"Stephanie Zacharek","articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta23668f31e9ec3d0/6998cd42a97fc0ecdaa750aa/Underappreciated-Movies-the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/50-most-underappreciated-movies/7353535/the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped/","name":"The Beat That My Heart Skipped"}}]}] ```