Critics reviews

Petite Maman is a pithy, gemlike film, clocking in at only 72 minutes and as pristine and poignant a reflection on the bonds that tie us to one another across time and generations as one can imagine.

Petite Maman’s charm derives from its youthful innocence... [It] acknowledges the pain we feel in the wake of death, a universal notion, and renders it profoundly empathetic in its detail and specificity, and its implications about generational femininity. The film doesn’t build to a calculated and contrived catharsis, but rather, a deeper understanding of what it means to love.

Sciamma has a way of building a world around a child that doesn’t feel condescending or overwhelming... Petite Maman is a fine balance of heartache and whimsy.

Sciamma has crafted a clever, deeply moving and emotionally resonant exploration of intergenerational connection and loss, with moments of startling insight.

What initially seems a straightforward fable about learning to grow up and enter the world becomes just as passionately a paean to remaining young and retaining the best aspects of childhood.what initially seems a straightforward fable about learning to grow up and enter the world becomes just as passionately a paean to remaining young and retaining the best aspects of childhood.

A story of spectral intervention told in decidedly un-spectral terms... The magic of Petite Maman is the ease with which it depicts [the mother and daughter's] convergence, its solace a feat of willing imagination.

At barely 72 minutes, [Petite Maman] breezes by before we realize how deeply it has implanted itself in our memory. There are heavy topics present here... But they exist within an aura of the fantastic that elevates them from a level of unbearable pain to a more comforting area of bittersweetness.

If Portrait of a Lady on Fire was grand in its emotions to a fault, Petite Maman feels intended to balance that swooning maximalism out with its appreciation of tiny gestures and quiet conversations... Petite Maman has the golden tone of a late-autumn afternoon, all changing leaves and woolen layers, but it doesn’t deal in nostalgia.

Petite Maman, Céline Sciamma crafts a staggeringly gorgeous fairy tale about the little things we don’t get to learn about the ones we love, the struggles of loss, and the loveliness of those that came from the path behind us.

[Petite Maman is] a film that’s equal parts about the fragility of childhood and the tension of familial ties, and its success relies on the subtle power of Sciamma’s arresting child actors... Petite Maman is a low-key masterpiece... a small film that leaves behind big ripples.

With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic... But there isn’t a false note or superfluous image in “Petite Maman,” which runs a just-right 72 minutes. It’s perfect.

Poetry on screen can’t be constructed, or willed into existence. Under the right circumstances, though, it can be allowed. Ms. Sciamma... has created those circumstances by putting an eerie encounter in front of our eyes and allowing us, over the course of 72 minutes, to discover its emotional resonance.