Critics reviews

The film is designed to make us fall in love with the stunning face on screen... Few but Kieslowski could execute such a film; though it welcomes analysis, it spigots ethereal sensuality and a universal human understanding.

Kieślowski doesn’t want to create anything resembling an answer to these magnetic questions about fate and chance. He simply wants us to experience them in all their sensual glory, and be open to the fact that our world can turn wonderfully upside down at any moment.

[It] retains the kind of mystery that subsists when the search for meaning and shape is undertaken with the seriousness and pleasure of game playing. It is the sense of pervasive trompe l’oeil, of the conjurer’s—rather than the puppeteer’s—art, that makes the film endure as a spellbinding experience, as well as a perplexing one.

[Jacob] acts with the flawless candor born of total confidence in her director: her look transcends the words she utters. She confides in the camera and, by extension, in us, her audience.

Seeing it again after all these years — I watched it seven times back in college, when it was still in theaters — it's remarkable that such an oblique film managed to become a breakthrough hit.

Sixteen years on, it remains a fascinating, shimmery bauble, a series of disarming, diaphanous epiphanies loosely structured around an intriguingly (and increasingly) opaque excuse for a plot.

These parallel lives rhyme so tunefully through the reflective cinematography and sweeping score that any confusion or disbelief tends to melt away.