Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

Kaurismaki is Finland's greatest filmmaker, and never has he more artfully balanced his patented blend of deadpan humor, low-key melodrama, and toe-tapping music.

Chicago Reader by Barbara Scharres

Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki perfects his trademark formula of deadpan humor and arctic circle pathos in this brilliantly ironic 2002 comedy.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

A powerful film made with minimal means, it's a story of poor people on the fringes of society, done without sentimentality or condescension but with wicked humor.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The message, if there must be one, of this marvelous, stubbornly personal movie is that there is a spark in every soul.

The New York Times by Dana Stevens

Like the great films of the 1930's and early 40's, it is at once artful and unpretentious, sophisticated and completely accessible, sure of its own authority and generous toward characters and audience alike -- a movie whose intended public is the human race.

Slate by David Edelstein

The revered Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki has hit on a way to give you grim social realism and movie-ish sentimentality in one fell swoop.

Time by Richard Corliss

Droll, reticent, flawlessly filmed fable of generosity.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

Offers up a subversive comic sensibility, one that somehow combines Buster Keaton's deadpan stare with Frank Capra's tireless optimism and filters them both through a black-ice Finnish point of view. Welcome to Aki World.

Variety by David Rooney

Enormously satisfying, superbly crafted.

Washington Post by Desson Thomson

Everything has a Chaplinesque feeling, from the largely silent scenes to the highly visual, tragicomic situations...But The Man Without a Past is entirely free of the tramp's cloying sentimentality.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

A dour-faced but sublime comedy about the kindness of strangers -- and about the strangeness of people who find themselves in oddball moments of grace.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

At the end of The Man Without a Past, I felt a deep but indefinable contentment. I'd seen a comedy that found its humor in the paradoxes of existence, in the way that things may work out strangely, but they do work out.

Portland Oregonian by Shawn Levy

Something in the simplicity of its vision gives The Man Without a Past a dimension of heroic grandeur -- and that effect, too, seems to tickle Kaurismaki's funny bone.

San Francisco Chronicle by Edward Guthmann

A master of minimalism, Finland's Aki Kaurismaki makes films that are so dry, so delicately ironic that they seem on the verge of crumbling in front of us -- but they never do.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

The Man Without a Past is a modern fairy tale. It certainly is divorced from reality. Despite this -– or perhaps because of it -– it's a satisfying motion picture.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Warm and utterly beguiling fable.

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

This may not be Kaurismäki's masterpiece, but it is a movie of sustained stylistic integrity -- and it has the power to make you laugh.