At a 124-minute runtime, though, the writer-director has stretched a wide canvas, and only sporadically found anything worth filling it with.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
This could have been a true urban mosaic. Instead, we simply get a vision of Paris as the city of lite.
Soggy stuff from French director Cedric Klapisch (When the Cat’s Away), set in the title city and collecting the routine travails of various urbanites.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
As a whole, though, Paris pulses with a contemporary version of the energy that animated Balzac's novels, or Colette's accounts of the life she observed from the window of her apartment in the Palais Royal.
New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier
Has a mature tapestry of characters, a welcome sense of humor and, most crucially, a lovely Juliette Binoche.
The tales mostly drift along and wrap up unresolved. If this is an accurate slice of Paris life, I'll take the relative excitement of Topeka.
Paris flits from story to story and character to character without doing justice to any of them.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
There are enough intersecting characters from different classes and backgrounds in Paris to evoke the city as a complex, healthy organism, whose parts are all connected. If it is too lighthearted to show the actual political and economic machinery behind it, its celebration of how well that machinery works produces a pleasant afterglow.