Jeunet provides numerous pleasures, particularly visual, along the way.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.
An epic treatment of epic themes that doesn't soft-soap its audience, but at the same time provides a terrifically satisfying entertainment.
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Starts slowly, but builds to a satisfying conclusion.
Village Voice by Jessica Winter
Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.
Told with a blend of visual mastery and emotional intimacy, ambitious venture sustains a special melding of romance and pragmatism that should engage discerning audiences.
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
An emotional powerhouse.
Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.
For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.