✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France · 2014
1h 38m
Director Thomas Cailley
Starring Adèle Haenel, Kévin Azaïs, Antoine Laurent, Brigitte Roüan
Genre Comedy, Romance
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
Arnaud, facing an uncertain future in a small coastal town, meets and falls for Madeleine. When Madeline joins an army boot camp to learn military and survival skills, Arnaud signs up for the boot camp himself. They soon realize that the boot camp is harder than they’d imagined, but the experience nonetheless brings them closer.
The Hollywood Reporter by Clarence Tsui
Love at First Fight is overflowing with relentlessly acerbic humor that shapes the way the film's two young protagonists contend with not just each other, but also with the uncertainties of the world they're emerging into as adults.
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
Transparently wearing metaphors on its singed sleeves, the film shuttles around courses of meaning and significance without committing to any.
The A.V. Club by Jesse Hassenger
Even when it’s slowing down, Fight shows beguiling confidence in both its filmmaking and its characters—enough to make its smallest romantic moments feel significant.
A sort of grown-up version of “Moonrise Kingdom,” France’s Love at First Fight has some youthful free-range charm but not nearly as much as its predecessor.
The Dissolve by Matthew Dessem
The title does a real disservice to the film, a romantic comedy made with both visual and narrative intelligence, centered by great performances from Kévin Azaïs and Adèle Haenel.
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Rejuvenating the romantic comedy through its unusual premise — in which training for an elite army unit releases a flood of pheromones — Cailley's film is also buoyed by its enormously appealing leads, Kévin Azaïs and Adèle Haenel.
Though the slow-boil chemistry is there, the script feels flat, content to rely on the surface friction between its lead actors, rather than creating scenes in which we can really get to know the pair’s respective personalities before testing their limits in the field.
RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley
Madeleine (Adele Haenel) does not know that she is a character in a rom-com. She thinks she's in a war movie. Or, better yet, a dystopian post-apocalyptic movie. Anything but a rom-com. She does not smile until an hour and 20 minutes into Love at First Fight.
Washington Post by Stephanie Merry
The actors make the movie’s memorable characters all the more indelible, even when Love at First Fight loses its sense of originality.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
For its first two-thirds, the film, written and directed by Thomas Cailley, seems to be groundbreaking. Then it slides into comforting familiarity.
A wanted criminal risks his safety for love while hiding out in Algiers.
He was born to wield the mighty sword of Thoren.
In a Mexico dominated by organized crime, a young woman clings to her dream of becoming a beauty contest queen.
Manhattan couple Marion and Mingus find their comfortable family dynamic jostled by a visit from Marion's relatives.
The story of a destiny.
A film by women for women ... and men who appreciate
A reflective story of love, duty, and the strain that comes from trying to find what you really want.
In an effort to put an end to his drug addiction, Thomas joins a community of former addicts who live isolated in the mountains