A.S. Hamrah The Baffler Sep 16, 2020

...the film moves sharply and elegantly. Berling's close resemblance to Christopher Guest added an odd element...

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Film4 Staff Film4 Mar 3, 2008

Despite an off-putting premise, this is a sumptuous drama boasting substance as well as spectacle.

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David Rooney Variety Mar 3, 2008

A massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.

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Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader Mar 3, 2008

Assayas is masterful in using offscreen sounds to conjure up a novelistic sense of milieu and in handling various ceremonies, and the film's lush texture explains why he called it his anti-Dogma film.

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Geoff Andrew Time Out Jun 24, 2006

Ambitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.

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Cole Smithey ColeSmithey.com Oct 10, 2005 4/5

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Emanuel Levy EmanuelLevy.Com Aug 20, 2005 4/5

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Harry Guerin RTÉ (Ireland) Mar 26, 2003 2/5

Enduring love but exhausting cinema.

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Dennis Schwartz Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews Mar 3, 2003 C+

The filmmaker's heart is in the right place...

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Greg Muskewitz eFilmCritic.com Dec 16, 2002 3/5

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Matt Brunson Film Frenzy Nov 20, 2002 2/4

An empty shell of an epic rather than the real deal.

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Philip Martin Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Nov 4, 2002 A-

It is...very good at showing how people can and do change over the course of a lifetime, how faith can be abandoned and then picked up, how love can ebb and mutate.

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Christopher Null Filmcritic.com Oct 22, 2002 2/5

An exhausting family drama about a porcelain empire and just as hard a flick as its subject matter.

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Susan Stark Detroit News Sep 13, 2002 2/4

More than a few of us would show up for the chance to see and hear Huppert and Beart read from the Limoges telephone directory. Assayas can count himself lucky for that.

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John Monaghan Detroit Free Press Sep 13, 2002 2/4

Opens at a funeral, ends on the protagonist's death bed and doesn't get much livelier in the three hours in between.

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Frank Swietek One Guy's Opinion Sep 13, 2002 C

Gorgeous to look at but insufferably tedious and turgid...a curiously constricted epic.

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Tom Sime Dallas Morning News Sep 12, 2002 B+

The movie is relentlessly gorgeous, and brims over with color, light and movement like a room-filling Monet canvas.

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Elbert Ventura PopMatters Sep 9, 2002

Death awaits us all, but Assayas, with a humanist's generosity, offers his characters the greatest gift art can give: immortality.

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Kim Morgan Oregonian Aug 30, 2002

Rich in detail, gorgeously shot and beautifully acted, Les Destinees is, in its quiet, epic way, daring, inventive and refreshingly unusual.

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Paula Nechak Seattle Post-Intelligencer Aug 6, 2002 B-

No one is better at putting modern urban life under the microscope than French director Olivier Assayas.

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