The Well Digger's Daughter Reviews
Top Critic"The Well-Digger's Daughter" isn't a mind-blower; it's not supposed to be. It's a light lunch with an old friend whom it's good to see again.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Auteuil's direction is a lot like his acting -- well-mannered and likable, yet staid and ultimately inconsequential.
To call "The Well Digger's Daughter" an old-fashioned film is to pay it a compliment. Here is a love story embedded in traditional values.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's classical moviemaking of a sort rarely seen now, a love story of surprising joy with rounded, flawed but humane characters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
What resonates is a sense of humanity that sometimes gets lost in films with less regard for traditional storytelling, or respect for simple emotion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Astrid Bergès-Frisbey as Patricia and Jean-Pierre Darroussin are almost enchanting, but it is Auteuil, entering a new career as mature actor-director, whom we want to cheer.
"The Well-Digger's Daughter" feels decidedly, almost defiantly, old-fashioned, but not necessarily in a bad way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's the first film directed by the actor Daniel Auteuil, as part of a four-film project to remake films by the writer-director Marcel Pagnol, and if the others are this good, this is a project to look forward to.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Let "The Well-Digger's Daughter" take you back in time, not once but several times over.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Auteuil the director knows not to get in the way of Pagnol's plot machinery. Auteuil the actor is another story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a movie that could easily have been made 50 years ago, and I don't mean that as a knock. There is much to be said for a film that values unflashy craft and simple, unhurried storytelling.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Even as you wish the material had been reshaped into something riskier, you may find yourself appreciating the sincerity and unshowy workmanship that went into the movie.
[It's] enjoyable enough as it plods along, and the final act wraps things up on a fulfilling note.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A pastoral wrapped in gauze, sunlight and sentimentality.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
An unchallenging but utterly palatable movie to take your subtitle-reading grandma to see on a Sunday afternoon.
You feel yourself slowing down and relaxing as you watch; there's nothing rushed or crowded about this film, just a quiet story carefully told.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Auteuil is hardly the first to sing the praises of Provence, but he sings with a passion eloquent enough to give nostalgia a good name.
The Well-Digger's Daughter pushes a number of nostalgia buttons at once, most of them pleasing.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Doesn't give us reason to assume that what we don't see is much more scandalous than what we do.
The humanist spirit of Gallic novelist-director Marcel Pagnol is alive and well in the old-fashionedly sincere The Well-Digger's Daughter.
here's a broad appeal to be gleaned from its antiquated charm, modest focus and a clutch of ripe, old-school character turns, especially from Auteuil in the lead and French stalwarts Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Sabine Azéma.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
[An] inauspicious but cheerfully populist directorial debut.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Daniel Auteuil offers a crowd-pleasing remake of a Marcel Pagnol classic.
