83
A coming-of-age film with a broader perspecttive is always welcome, and it paradoxically makes this as evocative and convincing a portrait of youth as the best work of François Truffaut.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
91
Consequence of Sound by Blake Goble
Arnaud Desplechin delivers a thrilling reminiscence that romanticizes and believes in youth’s ungraceful but intense splendors.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
My Golden Days more often privileges emotional truths over historical veracity. This helps not only to make the past dilemmas of the protagonists feel more immediate and real, but also suggests how, looking back, we see our lives as a succession of emotional experiences, not dry historical facts.
90
There is serious pain in this movie — pain that endures throughout the years — but also a sincere love for life lived, and life remembered.
90
Desplechin perfectly times the moment when drollery ends and anguish begins, and it’s that sense of vulnerability that lends the film an unexpected emotional force as it moves toward its return-home epilogue.
75
Slant Magazine by Kenji Fujishima
Arnaud Desplechin tries his hand at a coming-of-age tale, and does so with equal doses of mature reflection and youthful impetuosity.
88
Desplechin draws uniformly superb performances from his young cast, making the coming-of-age genre seem fresh and vital.
91
The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton
The film doesn't reinvent the wheel: it is, ultimately, a middle-class-white-boy coming-of-age tale of the kind that the cinema of France, and elsewhere, has never been lacking. But it's written, shot, cut and performed with such palpable joy, intelligence and warmth that it ends up feeling entirely fresh.
50
As a stand-alone film it flirts with utter incoherence.