San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

Bride Flight gives a panoramic sweep of lives as they're lived, as there is a lot of beauty in it.

New York Post by Lou Lumenick

The kind of lush, epic romantic weepie that Hollywood used to deliver on a regular basis for packed matinees at Radio City Music Hall.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Bride Flight takes this melodrama and adds details of period, of behavior, of personality, to somewhat redeem its rather inevitable conclusion.

Village Voice

The flashbacks dominate, playing like wet-inked storyboards: pioneer women forced into patriarch games; a baby born in secrecy and raised in deceit; Jewish legacy lost and found. When the men are all dead, the women speak freely, wrapping up two florid hours with a pickled sentence or two.

Variety

A devil-may-care adventurer and three vastly different gals emigrate from the Low Countries to New Zealand in the romantic epic Bride Flight, a glossy European meller that switches between the '50s, the '60s and the present

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.

Village Voice by Michelle Orange

The flashbacks dominate, playing like wet-inked storyboards: pioneer women forced into patriarch games; a baby born in secrecy and raised in deceit; Jewish legacy lost and found. When the men are all dead, the women speak freely, wrapping up two florid hours with a pickled sentence or two.

Variety by Boyd van Hoeij

A devil-may-care adventurer and three vastly different gals emigrate from the Low Countries to New Zealand in the romantic epic Bride Flight, a glossy European meller that switches between the '50s, the '60s and the present

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

Switching between the 1950s, the '60s, and the present, it's compelling in a middling miniseries kind of way – expansive but not terribly deep.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams

A tearjerking romance that belongs to another era, when female moviegoers wanted to be transported, not grounded in grim realities.

Washington Post by Stephanie Merry

Lovely scenery and historical context elevate the sentimental story lines above the soap opera domain.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Carrie Rickey

The beauty of the actors and the ravishing landscape of New Zealand goes a long way to make Ben Sombogaart's sudsy film so eminently watchable.

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

The plotlines are clichéd and the score overbearing, but uniformly strong turns go a long way towards shaping the lush, nostalgic atmosphere. Don't forget to bring tissues.

Time Out

Trauma from WWII haunts each character, but even the historical foregrounding doesn't keep Ben Sombogaart's weepie from being more soapy than serious.

The A.V. Club by Sam Adams

The subtitles and period setting conjure a smattering of respectability, but in essence, this is arthouse pap, particularly for older audiences, turning the past into a concatenation of worn-out tropes that comforts as it distorts. Think of it as instant mashed potatoes for the soul.

Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker

It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.