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90Blissfully funny, terrifically intelligent and tender when you least expect it to be.
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90In almost every way that I can think of, L'Auberge Espagnole is a perfect movie... It is a film that feels alive.
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90It's an exhilarating, funny, very sweet movie.
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88A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.
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88L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Hotel) is unexpectedly entertaining because it captures the point in young adulthood when life is unseriously serious, or maybe seriously unserious.
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83This community finds its balance with an easy effortlessness.
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80Not since Lukas Moodysson's "Together" has communal living been depicted with such warmth and feeling for the entire ensemble.
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80Writer-director-actor Cedric Klapisch simultaneously shows great moviemaking flair and reveals a very peculiar worldview.
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80Exhilarating comedy...Its warm, embracing spirit is refreshing in these divisive times.
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80Vignettish and offhand, but it’s extremely pleasant, and it suggests what can be done with lightweight equipment and a loose-limbed approach to the right subject. [19 May 2003, p. 94]
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75The movie is as light and frothy as a French comedy, which is what it is, a reminder that Cedric Klapisch also directed "When the Cat's Away" (1996).
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Klapisch frequently uses voiceovers to express Xavier’s thoughts, and Duris expresses those thoughts beautifully, with a quirky open face, tuned perfectly to whatever his character is thinking.
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75Best of all, L'Auberge Espagnol uses Barcelona as a veritable character, a picturesque, vivacious place where, as one character puts it, ''No one eats before 10 p.m."
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75Does a beautiful job of capturing that mood -- the exuberance and wistfulness of one man's last year of youthful irresponsibility before joining the rat race.
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75It energetically captures the frenzied pace of contemporary existence, the complexities of life in a multicultural world, the rootless joys of living in a foreign city and the heady world of possibilities one envisions while in college.
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75The movie also rather sweetly suggests that the apartment being shared is Europe itself. There's a reason this warm, stylish human comedy was a big hit all across the Continent: It conveys a new generation's conviction that borders no longer matter.
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75A lighthearted, good-natured motion picture that contains enough humor to leaven the tone and keep the drama from becoming too serious.
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75The atmosphere of gentle communal chaos is authentic enough to become the movie's dramatic center.
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70The characters are well-observed and mercifully unrepresentative of their home countries. (Kevin Bishop is laugh-out-loud funny as a clueless British visitor who shows up to offend more than one national sensibility.)
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70Presents an appealing and persuasive picture of European integration, in which national differences, which once sparked military and political conflict, are preserved because they make life sexier and more interesting.
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The film is a pleasant ramble through an eventful year. Klapisch's special effects--cameras speeding down hallways, superimposed images--are both amusing and annoying.
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63A film whose limitations are the same as its appeal: It's a bauble. Running at barely more than 80 minutes, the film is both a travelogue and a commercial for swinging polyglot Europe.
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60The real stars of the film are Francois Emmanuelli's vibrant production design, Klapisch's flair with inventive optical effects and above all Barcelona itself, captured here in all its baroque brilliance.
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60The pace is fairly hectic, which it needs to be. (Mustn't linger on bubbles.) The performances are warm, especially the tender Judith Godrèche as the doctor's wife.
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58While breezy and fun, the film is also flimsy and sloppy in style and content.
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50Beware of movies whose creators boast of the little effort involved. Little reward is what you're likely to get.
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50At times, writer-director Cedric Klapsich seems to be trying to copy the frestyle of "Amelie," but L'Auberge achieves only a fraction of its charm.
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40A dodgy, hit-or-miss affair that never quiet seems to gel: too many lumpy bits, and not enough crème.
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38Movies can certainly be worse than bad sitcoms, and this is one of them.
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30Klapisch wants his characters shiny bright, and winds up making them excruciatingly dull in the process. Watching L'Auberge Espagnole is like seeing the young Maoist revolutionaries of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 "La Chinoise" body-snatched by the international touring company of "Up With People."
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30Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 17
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Mixed: 1 out of 17
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Negative: 0 out of 17
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