The Artist Reviews
Top CriticIt isn't arty or intellectual, though it is artful and ingenious, and it's the rare crowd-pleaser that never feels obvious or pandering.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
There is literally nothing wrong with it. I don't have a single nit to pick, minor flaw to point out or little bit that annoyed me. It is pure magic from the first frame to the last.
You can't fault it as smart entertainment, which eschews parody to make a sincere tribute that also serves as cogent current commentary.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The movie ever fully shakes off its air of skillfully executed experiment, but it's spirited and charming nonetheless.
'The Artist': Michel Hazanavicius's novelty film owes much to Jean Dujardin's irresistible smile
For a movie that is so much about technique, it's surprising how affecting the story is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Artist is the most surprising and delightful film of 2011.
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
A silent movie shot in sumptuous black-and-white, no less. A silent flick made with not a jot of distancing winking, but instead born of a heady affection for a bygone, very bygone, era of filmmaking.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a rocket to the moon fueled by unadulterated joy and pure imagination.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's a gentle, wistful tale, but with an ending so joyous and movie-magical that you just might dance out of the theater. (I did.)
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Strangely, wonderfully, The Artist feels as bold and innovative a moviegoing experience as James Cameron's bells-and-whistles Avatar did a couple of years ago.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
"The Artist'' is a small, exquisitely-cut jewel in a style everyone assumes is 80 years out of date.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A beguiling tale about Hollywood's silent movie days that is itself silent, this made-in-L.A. French feature will charm cinephiles with its affection for one of the movies' golden ages.
This effort often manages to duplicate the magical pantomime of the era; a lovely scene in which Bejo drapes herself in the arms of a hung jacket as if it were a human lover could have come straight out of a Marion Davies picture.
The Artist is charming as all get-out, a delightful little movie about the movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
"The Artist" is such an engaging, delightful film that, if you like movies, you will walk out of the theater with a smile. You just will; it's that inspired.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Is "The Artist" a screwball comedy? A sentimental melodrama? A spoof? Serious? What? Yes, yes, yes and yes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Yes, it's virtually silent, it's black-and-white, and you might not know the leads. But if you don't take a chance on this film, we can't be friends any more.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
My, The Artist is delightful, ingenious, funny, poignant and, in its own small way, profound. Put Oscar on high alert.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Says something about stubbornness and ego (look at the pretension in that title again) and about the dangers everyone faces when they refuse to see that their world is changing around them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
In many ways - in all ways - "The Artist" is a profound achievement.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
This slight but enormously likable picture seems destined to be an awards magnet: A holiday release with enough formal sophistication to appeal to cinephiles and enough old-fashioned showbiz bravado to win over a general audience.
A cheeky trifle whose present-day novelty of being, well, silent and black-and-white carries it a long way.
"The Artist" should appeal to anyone willing to take a chance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
In a time when movies often are sonic assaults, and meaning can be lost amid the clatter of explosions, gunshots and screeching cars, The Artist has an utterly beguiling purity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
"The Artist" is the wonder of the age, as much a miracle as "Avatar," though it comes at things from the totally opposite direction.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Literally the kind of movie they just don't make anymore...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A project so idiosyncratic, so unlikely, so simultaneously innocent and sophisticated that it could only have been devised by the French.
This is not a work of film history but rather a generous, touching and slightly daffy expression of unbridled movie love.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Unfettered by irony, inspiring the kind of spontaneous emotional response we yearn for at the multiplex, [it] immerses us in joyful illusion, a world of movies within movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
It's a big, beribboned heart-tugger of a movie and Dujardin, who won the best actor award this year at Cannes, is a charming mimic of silent-film physicality.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
A crowd-pleaser even if you aren't steeped in film lore. As the old posters used to promise, it's got Comedy! Romance! Thrills! (As well as one of the most charming trained dogs you've ever seen on the big screen.)
As it opens, we're watching an audience watch a silent adventure film, and in a funny way we spend the rest of the movie watching ourselves get swept up in conventions we can see through.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Silent black-and-white movies are not coming back, but this one is such a rewarding labor of love by all of the artists involved that it just might make you wish they could.
Exuberantly entertaining and an emotional grower on reflection, Michel Hazanavicius's backstage drama takes the old A Star Is Born plot and makes it sing (very quietly).
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist will probably be the most successful silent movie since the days of the Gish sisters. It might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen.
"The Artist" is propelled by its performances, particularly Dujardin's. He has an exquisite elegance, and builds a whole movie with only his gestures. It's impossible to imagine "The Artist" without him, the wellspring of its charm.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
With supreme confidence and an informed, infectious fondness for his subject, writer-director Michel Hazanavicius manages to embrace contradictions and then resolve them with supreme comic grace.
The Artist is so wonderful that the audience applauds everything, including the dog.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The Artist encapsulates everything we go to movies for: action, laughs, tears and a chance to get lost in another world. How can Oscar resist?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
What Hazanavicius has wrought is damnably clever, but not cute; less like an arch conceit and more like the needle-sharp recollection of a dream.
The Artist never feels like a parody or a good idea that becomes laborious in the execution. It's lovingly corny, great fun, good-looking and respectful.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The Artist is a rarity, an ingenious crowd-pleaser.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Michel Hazanavicius's black-and-white throwback to cinema's silent era may seem steeped in fusty nostalgia, but it glitters and gleams with utterly of-the-moment wit and romantic zest.
Dujardin turns his impeccable imitation skills on a host of early film stars, combining Rudolph Valentino's smoldering appeal and slicked-back hair with Errol Flynn's panache and pencil moustache, while preserving an essential sincerity in the process.
Sends you home with your head in the clouds, intoxicated by the magic movies pull off better than any other art form.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Illustrates the movie medium's deathless pleasures.
