Critics reviews

[Beating Hearts] is much too long at nearly three hours—the story spans several years, with Adèle Exarchopoulos and François Civil playing older versions of the two leads—but I can’t say I didn’t warm to its rambunctious cornball charm.

Lellouche may not be an original, but he is a committed craftsman and an avid synthesizer of forms, and if there’s one thing this starry-eyed epic demonstrates, it’s that even well-worn genres can be enlivened by sincerity, surprises and visual punch — in other words, a bit of ouf.

While Beating Hearts is not exactly reinventing the wheel with its Romeo and Juliet narrative and Clotaire’s inevitably late-game redemption arc does feel a little rushed considering the film’s overall length, there’s still something likeable about this sweeping romance, despite its undeniable naivety.

Nothing [Lellouche has] directed previously would prepare anyone for the impressive visual authority he welds over the camera in “Beating Hearts”... It’s unfortunate that the romance at the center of the movie can’t live up to the lens Lellouche is viewing it through.

Crushed in particular by its score, Beating Hearts can nevertheless boast a certain suicidal panache and a few good ideas within its raging flood of kitsch and caricatures, valiantly (or unconsciously) owning up to all its excesses and its facile morality.

A terrific and unexpectedly potent piece of genre filmmaking that could, to avoid spoilers, be described as a kind of mash-up of Badlands and La Haine, as if directed by Walter Hill... [Beating Hearts] is a romantic banlieue opera that delivers all the gritty, vicarious thrills of the now-standard post-Goodfellas gangster movie but also burrows into issues of class and gender in refreshingly unpredictable ways.

An epic tale of love, revenge, youth, rage, and class, Beating Hearts (original French title L’Amour Ouf) is an extraordinarily lively work of cinema.

There are some good performances [in the film], and a very serviceable armed robbery scene. But Beating Hearts suffers from a lack of subtlety and bloat, with an increasingly insistent cry-bully sensitive-macho ethic, and a colossally inflated final section belatedly reassuring us of the film’s belief in the power and importance of love.

To his credit, Lellouche maintains a brutally high energy level from start to finish... [Yet] Lellouche’s grand romantic statement is as simple as it seems to be sincere, but it’s also overblown and downright vulgar at times. Love definitely conquers all in his world, including good taste.

“Beating Hearts” doesn’t have much of a second half; the movie feels like it’s killing time until the pair’s inevitable reunion... Lellouche and his co-screenwriters... haven’t figured out how to proportion the film. Major plot threads are left dangling, yet the stakes in an epilogue scene seem bafflingly low.

Beating Hearts [is] a grandiose love story whose characters ultimately cannot live up to the epic framework in which director Gilles Lellouche has placed them... This unapologetically sentimental drama actually works better in its first half.

[The film's] air of big-swinging, love-drunk bravado will buy Lellouche’s film a lot of goodwill from audiences... But it can’t entirely justify a gargantuan 165-minute running time, which is somewhat disproportionately split between multiple decades, and strangely backloaded in terms of drama.