Village Voice by Serena Donadoni

The widescreen intimacy of small moments — the flush of a rain-soaked cheek — humanizes Donzelli's grand folly and the couple who challenge the parameters of morality.

Hitfix by Gregory Ellwood

Demoustier is charismatic enough to almost help Donzelli pull it off, but Elkaïm is so stiff as Julien you never understand why Marguerite is willing to risk her life in the first place.

The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

It’s somehow both mannered and style-less, fantastical and under-imagined—perversely watchable, in other words.

The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij

Ambitiously mounted but wildly uneven.

CineVue by John Bleasdale

As fate closes in on the lovers, the silliness of their own behaviour and Marguerite & Julien in general prevents any pathos from entering the scene. The taboo of incest never troubles as one never truly believe that they are brother and sister - or in love - or anything else.

RogerEbert.com by Susan Wloszczyna

Rather than presenting something akin to the heady youthful cravings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as contemporary versions of Romeo and Juliet, the equally tragic Marguerite & Julien often feels more like a version of Richie and Margot in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” crossed with the pre-teen runaways from “Moonrise Kingdom,” but minus the humor and insight.

Variety by Jay Weissberg

The film is a painfully silly, laughably naive Romance with a capital “R.”

Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard

It finds its filmmaker completely lost between impulses to pay homage, play it safe, or offer something—anything—new.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

This buttock-clenchingly embarrassing movie from director Valérie Donzelli is a pre-Revolutionary period drama from the quality end of the sugary French market – theatrically tricked out with one or two annoying and clumsy Brechtian touches of stylised self-aware modernity.

The New York Times by Glenn Kenny

The excruciating experience of Marguerite & Julien need only be endured by viewers with an obsessive interest in the least constructive aesthetic currents in contemporary French cinema.