Renoir Reviews
Slant Magazine
A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
St. Paul Pioneer Press
If you are interested in Renoir, you're better off gazing at his beautiful body of work.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Top CriticTheret - who is supposed to be playing the muse to two great artists - never seems much more than young and pretty, and Rottiers only young and uncertain. When the film switches to them, it goes still.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
At least Mark Ping Bing Lee's luscious cinematography distracts from the shallow storytelling. There are worse things than luxuriating in a two-hour Côte d'Azur travel ad.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
AV Club
In short, it's the story of how two great artists were influenced by the naked lady lounging around their house.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
If you love the paintings of Auguste Renoir or the films of his son Jean, there's a good chance you'll sit through this slow-moving prestige item.
Gilles Bourdos's film is more conventional than its mould-breaking subjects deserve.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Stately to a fault, the film is not enough drama, too much still life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
National Post
At least the French art house biopic is rich in ambiance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Montreal Gazette
Bourdos's film offers an eye-pleasing approximation of the world that inspired Renoir to continue his prodigious output to the very end.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Austin American-Statesman
Renoir really does have the lush glory of a Renoir, and that isn't easy to sustain. Any given freeze frame in this thing is lovely to behold. See Renoir for the glorious light and Theret's strong performance, but don't expect a whole lot of conflict.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Movie Nation
Lovely, with everybody in the story more interesting than the dull, dedicated craftsman whose name provides the title.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Renoir" is so beautiful, and so intelligently conceived, that you keep waiting, in vain, for a bit of fire to break out in the narrative.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Renoir" is a story of creativity in twilight, and at its dawning. Appropriately enough, most of its scenes are fit to be framed, all soft tones and sun-dappled.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Film-Forward.com
Accompanying the spirited muse of two Renoirs, a gorgeous immersion into nature, family, love, and art in the Côte d'Azur during the summer of 1915.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
Appreciative but undramatic look at the young woman who was vital to the Renoirs, father-painter Pierre-Auguste and son-filmmaker-to-be Jean.
Like the paintings of the master, "Renoir" is beautiful to look at, but it would be a mistake to call the film (or its subject) shallow.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Spirituality and Practice
An exquisite and sense-luscious French film about the great artist and his last muse.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Reeling Reviews
Bourdos hired art forger Guy Ribes to be the 'hands' of the painter, and so "Renoir" is a real look at art being created, showing us how nudes can be conjured out of a few rounded lines, how a stroke of brown paint defines a woman's curves.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
