Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

The scene is so emotionally ravishing that it breaks you apart. The peacefulness that finally descends on Séraphine in the film's final moments is more than a balm. It's a benediction.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

What makes Seraphine, directed and co-written by Martin Provost, so exceptional is that it neither condescends to nor romanticizes its subject.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

It "explains" nothing but feels everything. It reminds me of two other films: Bresson's "Mouchette," about a poor girl victimized by a village, and Karen Gehre's "Begging Naked," shown at Ebertfest this year, about a woman whose art is prized even as she lives in Central Park.

Entertainment Weekly

Moreau is bewitching -- she simply breathes her role, without a hint of vanity.

Entertainment Weekly by Adam Markovitz

Moreau is bewitching -- she simply breathes her role, without a hint of vanity.

Portland Oregonian by Stan Hall

Among the best of its kind, thanks in no small part to the utterly believable, vanity-free performance of Yolande Moreau in the title role.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

Séraphine is one of the most evocative films about an artist I've ever seen--and in its treatment of madness one of the least condescending.

Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall

Provost and cowriter Marc Abdelnour explore the mutable boundaries between spirituality, naivete, genius, and madness, showing how the two outsiders and polar opposites cultivated a mutual understanding.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

The rare movie that manages to convey the inner soul of an artist.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

What Moreau does with this role is as inscrutably moving as anything Séraphine Louis painted.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams

With exquisitely simple images and minimal dialogue, Seraphine is both haunting and humane.

NPR by Bob Mondello

Writer-director Martin Provost tells much of Seraphine's true-life story without words, lingering here on the process by which she makes paints, there on the obsessive single-mindedness she brings to her art.

The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck

Moving historical drama brings a fascinating chapter of art history to life.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

The mystery of Séraphine de Senlis -- who died in a mental hospital in 1942 and whose work survives in some of the world’s leading museums -- is left intact at the end of Séraphine. Rather than trying to explain Séraphine, the film accepts her.

Village Voice

Séraphine's dependence on her patron--a cultivated but emotionally detached homosexual, who knew a fellow outsider when he saw one but came and went in her life without warning--is almost as unbearably moving as her inevitable unraveling--when money and fame cut the artist off from her creative wellsprings and drove her over the edge.

Variety by Eddie Cockrell

An extraordinary performance by vet thesp Yolande Moreau in the title role.

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

Séraphine is far more powerful when it lingers on Louis at work.