Séraphine (2008)
Average Rating: 7.5/10
Reviews Counted: 93
Fresh: 83 | Rotten: 10
Seraphine is a well-crafted French film that effectively captures one woman's experience with art, religion, and mental illness, and features a brilliant performance from Yolande Moreau.
Average Rating: 8/10
Critic Reviews: 29
Fresh: 29 | Rotten: 0
Seraphine is a well-crafted French film that effectively captures one woman's experience with art, religion, and mental illness, and features a brilliant performance from Yolande Moreau.
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 15,149
Movie Info
Belgian actress Yolande Moreau headlines this biopic, starring as a little-known but uncommonly brilliant painter. Frenchwoman Séraphine Louis (Moreau), aka Séraphine de Senlis, lived from 1864 to 1942. Though ostensibly a shepherdess and housekeeper whose chief duties involved cooking, cleaning, and ironing, in her off-hours Séraphine joyously turned to natural elements of the outdoor world, with which she felt a tremendous degree of emotional and spiritual communion. Séraphine channeled these
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Cast
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Yolande Moreau
Séraphine, Séraphine, ... -
Ulrich Tukur
Wilhelm Unde -
Anne Bennent
Anne Marie -
Geneviève Mnich
Madame Duphot -
Nico Rogner
Helmut -
Adelaide Leroux
Minouche -
Serge Lariviere
Duval -
Françoise Lebrun
Mère Supérieure, Mère...
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All Critics (93) | Top Critics (29) | Fresh (83) | Rotten (10) | DVD (2)
What makes this slow, intense film so compelling is its persuasive creation of complex characters: You scarcely believe Moreau is an actor and that the film isn't, on some level, archival footage of the real painter.
Top CriticA naive, between-the-wars French painter is brought to vivid life in the satisfying fact-inspired drama Seraphine.
Provost and cowriter Marc Abdelnour explore the mutable boundaries between spirituality, naivete, genius, and madness, showing how the two outsiders and polar opposites cultivated a mutual understanding.
This utterly beguiling biopic about a cleaning lady with the artistic gifts of a Van Gogh is just a bit special.
Yolande Moreau plays the industrious but touched washerwoman-turned-painter Séraphine de Senlis with an open-faced conviction that is almost unnerving in its intensity.
Seraphine is rare in its sympathetic focus on a laborer, yet refined in its execution.
Provost's film has few equals in depicting the dangerous territory between artistic inspiration and madness.
Gives testimony to the human spirit.
Thoughtful as it is, the movie lacks the poetry or point of view to see its idea through with force.
Engrossing, well-shot bio-pic ... which won seven Cesars, including Best Picture, from the French Academy in 2008, has a gorgeous antique look and a surfeit of empathy. A lovely, lingering film.
It's a plodding film in its storytelling, but with a sensitive attitude to its subject. In its best moments, it simply wonders at the rapturous state in which this devout Christian creates her art.
Séraphine is a deceptively subtle tale.
It's like reading the introductory essay in an exhibition catalogue, except that it takes two hours. Personally, I couldn't stop thinking of Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent.
This biopic, which swept the board at the Césaires, is somewhat over-inclined to reverence and simplification; but it is also, some of the time, rewarding and touching.
This true story dragged out for so long that I ceased to care.
Séraphine doesn't mess with the formula but the script allows plenty of awkward details to remain and we're allowed to decide for ourselves if fame was a godsend for her.
Made with a remarkable attention to detail that makes the characters and period spring vividly to life
Superb central performance in this original take on the art biopic.
Depends on your levels of Christmas spirit. Nativity either glorifies the charming amateurishness of the British school play or celebrates the slapdash incompetence of the British film industry.
A classy drama and a sympathetic portrait of two outsiders and the vibrant, unsettling work that binds them.
A measured, soulful and tactile work; a film with gouache beneath its fingernails.
A little long, but quietly rewarding.
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Movie: ID: 770798728 Title: Séraphine Release Date: 2009-06-05 00:00:00.0 MPAA: 2 Status: 1
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Foreign Titles
- Seraphine (UK)
- Seraphine (CA)
