Variety by Lisa Nesselson

A period drama marbled with humor, bold gestures and bittersweet consequences.

The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett

With a cast of Scottish, German and French actors all speaking their own language, writer-director Christian Carion has fashioned a deeply moving and uplifting piece.

USA Today by Claudia Puig

Joyeux Noël is gritty and disturbing with its extended scenes of war and destruction. It also is emotional, even a touch sentimental.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

Though it's not the great film "Grand Illusion" is, and though it may strike some as a little schmaltzy, it still has some of that earlier film's deep feeling and empathy for soldiers trapped in the jaws of war and for the joys of Christmas--for believers and non-believers alike.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

It's a profoundly moving story of -- yes! -- the human spirit rising above horrible circumstances, and simultaneously a work of nostalgia for the gentlemen's war that marked the end, or the beginning of the end, of Christian Europe's world domination.

Dallas Observer by Melissa Levine

But except for a few missteps, the movie is so beautifully and sensitively rendered in its particulars, in its characterizations of soldiers and officers, and in its dramatization of a nearly miraculous event, that the result is an affecting piece of cinema.

Austin Chronicle by Marrit Ingman

The movie isn't perfect – Spielberg-slick, its power is sometimes dampened by melodrama that overstates its message – but it is compelling and thought-provoking and topical as hell.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

If audiences are hesitant to believe that the fraternization in this film really happened, it will be because of the storytelling, not the story.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

An intense but fairly brief battle scene near the start reminds us of the unique horrors of this war. But the hokey music played over it hints that the film is going to try too hard to touch us. And it soon does.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.

Los Angeles Times by Carina Chocano

The uncomplicated humanism of Joyeux Noël, with its Christmas message of peace, feels at once irrefutable and refreshing.

L.A. Weekly by Ella Taylor

Joyeux Noël finishes up as no more than a garden-variety tearjerker, neatly packaged for Oscar candidacy. It's not hard to see why the French chose this inoffensive weepie as their nominee for best foreign-language film, when they might have had Jacques Audiard's far superior, if more difficult, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" or Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings & Queen."

Village Voice by Jessica Winter

Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.

The A.V. Club by Nathan Rabin

Though a painless time-passer, Joyeux Noël ultimately contributes little to the venerable anti-war genre beyond its curious message that to some degree, war is hell because it prevents soldiers from making really neat friends and pen-pals from different counties.

New York Daily News by Jami Bernard

You can't go wrong with an uplifting, anti-war story like this, but director Christian Carion trowels on the schmaltz, and the movie's emphasis on Christian values actually seems to spell doom for solving today's conflicts with the Middle East.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth?