The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz

Quiet and reverent, as if filmed entirely in hushed tones, Sciamma’s film is supremely confident in its every element.

TheWrap by Alonso Duralde

It’s particularly resonant, packed with emotion and insight that will move the director’s admirers (who should consider watching it alongside their own children) and probably garner her some new ones.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving.

The Observer (UK) by Mark Kermode

Petite Maman is short and sweet, yet fearlessly profound. A mix of fairytale, ghost story and rites-of-passage journey, this is at heart a cinematic parable about healing intergenerational wounds, about breaching the barriers that inevitably grow between parents and children.

Little White Lies by Aimee Knight

Petite Maman becomes a profound meditation on inheritance.

Empire by Helen O'Hara

A story even more delicate and moving than Sciamma’s last effort, this takes an unusual and thoughtful look at girlhood, motherhood and friendship. It’s enchanting.

CineVue by Matthew Anderson

In the cyclical, ethereal narrative of this inventive, tender story of love and loss, one of the finest filmmakers of our time spins a spellbinding magical web.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

Petite Maman generates continual surprise and delight, paradoxically, by treating even the strangest circumstances with a wry matter-of-factness.

The Associated Press by Lindsey Bahr

Sciamma is able to bring to life essential truths of what it is like to be that strange age and the sometimes frightening, sometimes wonderful vastness of a limitless imagination. And she even does it without a background score to manipulate our tear ducts.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

The result is at once both the most ordinary and most enchanted thing that Sciamma has made so far, a wise and delicate wisp of a movie.

The Film Stage by Orla Smith

Petite Maman is, amongst other things, a beautiful ode to mother-daughter love and a melancholy acknowledgment of the distance that always exists in that relationship, when both parties are separated by age and responsibility.

Screen Rant by Mae Abdulbaki

Petite Maman is the kind of film that lays itself bare without ever being over-the-top, shaping itself into a story that lingers in one’s memory for a while after it’s over.

Variety by Peter Debruge

In their children, parents often see reflections of the kids they once were. But daughters can’t access those same memories without a little magic. And that’s just what Petite Maman delivers: the spell that makes such a reunion possible, if only in our imaginations.

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

Like its dappled forested backdrop, the film is a thing of pensive beauty rather than volatile drama.

Slant Magazine by Pat Brown

The film evinces Céline Sciamma’s profound knack for visual economy, communicating much with silent looks and structured absences.

The Playlist by Caitlin Quinlan

Its achievement lies in the space it creates for these children to open up a dialogue they rarely get to have – one that inevitably asks more questions, but that welcomes them as mature thinkers, keen to understand more about those raising them and the conditions in which they are being raised

The Playlist

Its achievement lies in the space it creates for these children to open up a dialogue they rarely get to have – one that inevitably asks more questions, but that welcomes them as mature thinkers, keen to understand more about those raising them and the conditions in which they are being raised