50
A beautiful wisp of an idea that is seldom compelling and almost never coherent, Planetarium squanders an irresistibly alluring premise.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Screen International by Graham Fuller
Rebecca Zlotowski’s third feature packs in so many ideas and themes, and boasts so many ravishing and enigmatic images, that it seems choked with riches.
80
Few of Planetarium's many strands are neatly tied together. There's an ambition to almost every shot as Zlotowski creates a rarified version of nighttime Paris.
40
The Hollywood Reporter by Jon Frosch
The movie is all tease and no follow-through, letting its story leak out in dribs and drabs that fail to gather any momentum or meaning, let alone mystery.
50
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Numerous potentially interesting ideas orbit one another in Planetarium, but none boasts sufficient gravity to merit a landing, it seems.
50
Little is left after a while until, finally, Planetarium doesn’t conclude so much as come to an end, and the lasting impression is one of bitterness — a bitterness at once sweetened and worsened by memories of the genuinely great work it had promised and, at turns, even embodied.
30
Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.
40
Though its mix of European romanticism, lustrous trappings, and nostalgic movie love can occasionally make Planetarium feel like a galaxy all its own, the effect is more illusory than enveloping.
42
To her credit, Zlotowski’s film does capture the lulling feeling of a séance, but there’s a gossamer-thin thread between the mysterious and the mystifying and perhaps her delicately ephemeral film just doesn’t know how to recognize the difference.
38
Given all its clumsily executed genre detours and tonal fluctuations, Rebecca Zlutowski’s film suggests an amateur juggling act.