To luxuriate in the film's 3-hour, 10-minute length is to experience this masterpiece as it hasn't been experienced since the day it opened.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2012

If you give this movie time to work on you, the elements that seem overly artificial or impossibly distant from our own time fade into insignificance, and you're left with a complicated and wonderful romantic drama that's full of surprises.

| Mar 8, 2012

Before French cinema reinvented itself with jump cuts and cool bobs, Marcel Carné's 19th-century backstage drama was the epitome of good taste: a sumptuous spread of genteel sparring and epic heartache.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 6, 2012

Marcel Carné's towering intimate epic of early 19th-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time.

| Mar 6, 2012

Poetry with a capital "P," sprinkled with fairy dust.

| Mar 5, 2012

Even if the style is from another age, once seen it lives in the imagination for ever.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 11, 2011

It runs 187 minutes, and it's worth every one of them.

| Jan 9, 2008

What ultimately defines the film, though, what makes it unforgettable, is its tragic gravity.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 22, 2006

A marvellously witty, ineffably graceful rondo of passions and perversities.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2006

On the basis alone of performance and of its bold, picturesque mise en scene, Les Enfants du Paradis is worth your custom. What you get otherwise is to boot.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2003

Carné's France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming's cotton pickin' South, is a poetic realist's wonderland.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 26, 2002

All discussions of Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise begin with the miracle of its making.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 10, 2002

The movie has flashes of oldtime magic. It's a precious piece of time past -- and time kept.

| Jan 1, 2000