Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The Well Digger's Daughter is such a success that Auteuil has already been signed to direct three more Pagnol classics, and I eagerly want to see them.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

It's a movie that could easily have been made 50 years ago, and I don't mean that as a knock. There is much to be said for a film that values unflashy craft and simple, unhurried storytelling.

The Hollywood Reporter

A polished, finely acted tale of love and class in the south of France.

NPR by Ella Taylor

The Well-Digger's Daughter offers a fervent poem to the region's abundant beauty.

The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer

A polished, finely acted tale of love and class in the south of France.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

Best of all "Daughter" marks a return to old-school French moviemaking, the kind of classically well-made endeavor that unrolls before us like a beloved tapestry. This is the kind of film they don't make anymore, only here it is.

Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

The Well-Digger's Daughter pushes a number of nostalgia buttons at once, most of them pleasing.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

The Well Digger's Daughter is old-fashioned in the best sense, almost cozy in its conventions.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Carrie Rickey

For lovers of classical French cinema, and I am one, this earthy throwback is a whiff of lavender borne by the bracing winds of the mistral.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Calvin Wilson

The Well-Digger's Daughter is perhaps a bit too sentimental. But the performances are so heartfelt that its occasional excesses are easily forgiven. In a movie summer too often obsessed with things that go boom, this film is all about romance.

Variety

The humanist spirit of Gallic novelist-director Marcel Pagnol is alive and well in the old-fashionedly sincere The Well-Digger's Daughter, a competent remake of Pagnol's eponymous 1940 melodrama about a working-class girl impregnated by a young pilot who's sent off to war.

Variety by Boyd van Hoeij

The humanist spirit of Gallic novelist-director Marcel Pagnol is alive and well in the old-fashionedly sincere The Well-Digger's Daughter, a competent remake of Pagnol's eponymous 1940 melodrama about a working-class girl impregnated by a young pilot who's sent off to war.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

Like Provence itself, Auteuil is in no hurry to get anywhere, reveling instead in the southern region's brilliant light and whispering crickets. His tangy accent and evident fondness for his character make the picture enjoyable enough as it plods along, and the final act wraps things up on a fulfilling note.

Slant Magazine by Bill Weber

Ultimately comes off as curiously anecdotal, lacking the dramatic dynamism that could give Marcel Pagnol's tale new life.

Village Voice

Stirrings of dignified outrage via the eponymous well-digger eventually go a long way toward energizing the film, which improves markedly once it shifts its focus from the World War I–era milieu toward how quickly a naive young girl can turn into a fallen woman and the ways in which that fallout affects her father, her family, and apparently most importantly, her name.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

There are times in The Well-Digger's Daughter, a once-upon-a-time French film about love, family and the seductive beauty of the Provençal countryside, when the story's sweetness nearly makes your teeth ache.

Time Out by Eric Hynes

Bergès-Frisbey and Duvauchelle make for a deliciously ripe pair - their cheekbones defy both gravity and sound facial architecture - but Auteuil is less interested in young lust than old world values.