| 100 |
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Alain Resnais' 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, "Smoking/No Smoking"; that film tried to be as "English" as possible. But this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British culture, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy "Muriel" and "Providence."
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| 100 |
Premiere
Glenn Kenny
Resnais employs all the tools of studio-bound moviemaking, silent-era to post-modern, in a way that is not only is consistently dazzling in a purely visual sense, but contains an empathy that lifts the picture to tragic heights even at those points at which it seems practically weightless.
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| 100 |
Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
A masterpiece by any measure, is fresh, immediate and contemporary, but its wintry yet warm perspective is suffused with the wisdom and experience of a great filmmaker who turns 85 on June 2.
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| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
The cast is tremendous; these actors work with Resnais like a well-oiled stock company that knows every trick and can communicate almost telepathically.
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| 90 |
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
It's a Parisian romantic roundelay with sundry couples connecting and disconnecting, but it looks and sounds like no sex comedy ever made: It's transcendentally yummy.
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| 83 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
Resnais and Ayckbourn care primarily about observing these characters' private and public faces, who they are and who they present themselves as. To that end, they've achieved a mood of enchanting intimacy.
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| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
The grand old filmmaker frames each scene like a fine painting. And fake snow falls with happy artificiality between rueful vignettes.
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| 80 |
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous. The role of the artist remains, for Mr. Resnais, the role of a lifetime.
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| 80 |
Village Voice
Jim Ridley
Resnais is now 84 years old; perhaps it takes eight decades of living to make a movie this compassionate, this confident--and this young.
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| 75 |
New York Post
V.A. Musetto
Clever, wise and witty.
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| 75 |
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
Resnais cuts constantly between the various narrative threads, signaling each change of scene with a superimposed shower of snowflakes; it's a highly artificial device, and a deceptively lovely one that reinforces the sense that all Ayckbourn's characters are slowly succumbing to an emotional chill.
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| 70 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
This is a minor film from a master, which is disappointing, but nevertheless it has its charms, most notably in the acting by a cast of stage and screen veterans.
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| 63 |
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
The film is beautifully shot and edited, but these emotional snapshots won't stay long in the memory.
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| 63 |
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
Private Fears says that life is a smoldering holding pattern, but Resnais is gracious enough to blanket the embers with eternal snow.
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| 60 |
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann
The picture is so suavely made that we don't feel disappointed until it is over: what chiefly holds us is the quality of the acting.
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| 60 |
Variety
Jay Weissberg
Despite a perfect cast of Resnais regulars plus the master's own impeccable crafting, the characters fail to grip, and with approximately 50 short scenes, development comes in fits and starts.
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| 50 |
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
I found the interlocking bitterness of Ayckbourn's play irritating and overly neat, and these people don't seem to belong to Paris or London or anywhere else, at least not anytime in the last 20 years.
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| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Ruthe Stein
Suffers from Resnais' inability to open it up and give it the look and pulse of a film.
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