Very Long Engagement, A

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Rapturously beautiful, startlingly audacious and often very funny, the film employs many of the techniques that were used so pleasingly in "Amélie."

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's a magical film which manages to transport and rivet us in the same highly-imaginitive, breezily playful way "Amelie" did.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

Hauntingly tells a story older than the Odyssey and as timely as today's body count from Iraq.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

A unique and masterful film, filled with surprises and felicities and moments of transporting visual power.

Entertainment Weekly 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.

Time Richard Corliss

Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.

Variety Lisa Nesselson

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.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

The holiday season's best movie so far.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."

Film Threat Michael Ferraro

The film is near perfect in its attempt to properly mix the irrationality of war in with an interesting love story.

New York Magazine Ken Tucker

When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.

USA Today Mike Clark

A long movie that almost wears out its 21/4-hour welcome, yet it's full of surprises.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

An epic treatment of epic themes that doesn't soft-soap its audience, but at the same time provides a terrifically satisfying entertainment.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

An emotional powerhouse.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.

The Hollywood Reporter Bernard Besserglik

Jeunet provides numerous pleasures, particularly visual, along the way.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.

Slate David Edelstein

The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.

Empire Ian Nathan

Inventive and lyrical, A Very Long Engagement is a joyous contradiction in terms: a war-torn romantic comedy.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A Very Long Engagement is "Cold Mountain" with French people.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Certainly long and not always engaging and comes with a predictably basic ending, yet there are unexpected pleasures, moments of beauty and tiny pockets of joy to sustain you through the journey.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

It's an odd, initially jarring mixture of style and subject matter that works better as the film goes along.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The movie works amazingly well as a historical epic.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

There are many ways to say that war is hell, but few filmmakers have said it with as much imagination, humor, intrigue and humanity as Jean-Pierre Jeunet in A Very Long Engagement.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Longer than necessary, that is, for the story it has to tell. This flaw aside, the drama is well crafted and sometimes touching, with especially forceful opening scenes.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Starts slowly, but builds to a satisfying conclusion.

TV Guide Ken Fox

The film is a trifle long too long for its rather slim mystery, but in face of so much beauty and invention that's a small quibble.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Mathilde's story is well enough handled by Jeunet to be endurable, and the rest of the film is a reward.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's just exhausting. For all of the movie's sumptuous, eyepopping craft, you'll feel more than a little relief when Mathilde finally reaches the end of her quest.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Sacrifices compelling drama for gratuitous whimsy and big-budget spectacle.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Engagement simply disappears inside its own enormous, intricate and ambitious design.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life.

Village Voice 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.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

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.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.

Dallas Observer Melissa Levine

The result is nothing but allusive and memorial. And boring. This film is boring, at least partly because it is trying desperately to be big.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

The elements are all here for something spectacular – and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it – but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.