Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

Intimate and human yet deeply ambitious, a powerhouse of a film made with a disturbing vision.

Variety by David Stratton

Guediguian's seemingly sprawling but in fact quite precise picture takes a while to establish itself, but is eventually rewarding viewing.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Sean Axmaker

Fumbling characters find that survival is not a matter of economics alone, it's also a matter of hope.

L.A. Weekly by Ernest Hardy

Leaves you reeling from the force of the humanity it captures and -- in its own gut-wrenching way -- honors.

Chicago Tribune by Mark Caro

The movie may not be as toxic and ultimately hopeless as Todd Solondz's "Happiness," but it also fails to find humor, dark or light, in anything.

Charlotte Observer by Lawrence Toppman

The sense of loneliness and disaffection makes its effect. Guédiguian offers no answers, and the hope he supplies is almost surreal.

Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

It doesn't quite wash. Guédiguian has a telling instinct for the buried shame of working-class squalor, but his film is inflated with a doom that feels programmatic rather than earned.

New Times (L.A.) by Gregory Weinkauf

The challenge faced here by writer-director Robert Guédiguian (Charge!) is to keep his cheap melodrama from curdling his insightful societal appraisal.

Chicago Reader by Ted Shen

Some of the film's situations and motivations seem convenient or underdeveloped, but Ascaride and Darroussin are riveting, and Guediguian's frankness and empathy illuminate this kaleidoscope of lonely lives.

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

The last-minute combination of Greek tragedy and Janis Joplin is so genuinely startling that, had the movie been shorted by a third, it might have turned everything around.