Premiere by Glenn Kenny

Every performer in the international cast -- Seigner, de Bankole, von Sydow (magnificent as Bauby's father), and the late Jean-Pierre Cassel to name but a few -- completely disappears into each of their roles, which I think is as much a testament to Schnabel's talents as to theirs.

Newsweek by David Ansen

Schnabel, screenwriter Ronald Harwood and Spielberg's great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have found a way to take us inside Bauby's mind--his memories, his fantasies, his loves and lusts--transforming a story of physical entrapment and spiritual renewal into exhilarating images.

The New Yorker by David Denby

Schnabel’s movie, based on the calm and exquisite little book that Bauby wrote in the hospital, is a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

The film is a masterpiece in which “locked-in” syndrome becomes the human condition.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

The movie has done what those who've cherished the book might have thought impossible -- intensified its singular beauty by roving as free and fearlessly as Bauby's mind did.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Amalric is extraordinary, creating a character literally without moving a muscle.

New York Post by Lou Lumenick

You won't have a more viscerally emotional experience at the movies this year.

Salon by Stephanie Zacharek

The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.

The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett

Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have performed a small miracle in adapting for the screen Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

It is wonderful: a rhapsodic adaptation of a memoir, a visual marvel that wraps its subject in screen romanticism without romanticizing his affliction. It left me feeling euphoric.

The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson

Schnabel's sleepy, drifty, at times morbidly funny film tackles something more ambitious, by getting into the head of someone who's trying to get out of there himself.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

In a film that overwhelmingly avoids happy-faced pronouncements, this one sticks out.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The most beautiful movie ever made about a man who could only move one eyelid -- almost dangerously beautiful.

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

The movie will wipe you out. Schnabel's previous two films (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) also focused on artists. But this is his best film yet, a high-wire act of visual daring and unquenchable spirit.

Variety by Justin Chang

Most compelling in its attempts to re-create the experience of paralysis onscreen, gorgeously lensed pic morphs into a dreamlike collage of memories and fantasies, distancing the viewer somewhat from Bauby's consciousness even as it seeks to take one deeper.

Village Voice

Far too often, though, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly feels grotesquely calculated, especially the more Schnabel ratchets up the inspirational platitudes of exactly the sort that Bauby--who maintained an acerbic sense of humor about his situation until the very end--would have despised.