Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

Beloved spans 45 years, shifting from Paris to Prague to London to Montreal, and it boasts an especially strong performance by Paul Schneider.

Empire by David Hughes

Christophe Honoré goes epic in a tale of interlocking lives that owes a debt to Jacques Demy. It won't be to everyone's taste but it's playful enough to win us over.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Beloved never really earns its sprawling timeline, eventually getting bogged down with too many developments and overstaying its welcome. For a movie where people intermittently burst into song, the plot is oddly one-note.

The A.V. Club

Honoré's combination of contemporary romantic hijinks and the stylization inherent in the musical genre aren't juxtaposed ironically: Beloved is a tenderly sincere musical that celebrates love even as it acknowledges the ways in which it can sometimes lead to tragedy.

The A.V. Club by Alison Willmore

Honoré's combination of contemporary romantic hijinks and the stylization inherent in the musical genre aren't juxtaposed ironically: Beloved is a tenderly sincere musical that celebrates love even as it acknowledges the ways in which it can sometimes lead to tragedy.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

It's as if he has been trying to express something, or to make his own particular kind of good movie, for 10 whole years. Now he has.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

By the time it glides -- not lumbers -- to the closing credits, it's also amazingly moving.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Beloved is at once whimsical and heartfelt, alive to the absurdity and perversity of amorous behavior and also to the gravity and intensity of human emotions.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

At 40, Mastroianni is looking more and more like her father, Marcello Mastroianni. She has his eyes and that air of existential befuddlement, and she's beginning to suggest the magnificent ruin he became in his later career.

Total Film by Tom Dawson

Alex Beaupain's songs effectively convey emotion, but Beloved doesn't scale the heights of the Truffaut and Demy films it pastiches.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The movie is at its lightest, most charming and most persuasive in the 60s; as it approaches the present, something inescapably preposterous weighs it down, though Honoré carries it off with some flair.

Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo

Ultimately crammed at a frustrating juncture between period-piece froth and seriously conceived drama, never tipping its hand toward either.

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

Long before your 140 minutes are up, you may wish you went to see "Sparkle" instead.

Time Out by David Fear

Even with Gallic neomusical royalty like Catherine Deneuve joining in the fray, the whole endeavor reeks of the filmmaker throwing everything against the wall yet barely making anything stick.

Village Voice by Melissa Anderson

A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.

The Playlist by James Rocchi

Honoré's made better films, and he'll make better films again; the most damning thing you can say about this one isn't that it feels like Honore doing a third-rate imitation of Francois Ozon ("Potiche," "8 Women"), but rather that it often feels like Honoré doing a third-rate imitation of himself.