Gainsbourg is often just the right side of uncomfortably intimate, but that's what makes it such a magnetic film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 19, 2021

It's as surprising and unconventional as the man himself -- but that doesn't mean it serves him well.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 5, 2019

Great songs, beautiful girls, lovely costumes and an artist in a constant state of flux are emphasised in Joann Sfar's imaginative, beautiful and suitably bizarre musing on the life of Serge Gainsbourg.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 6, 2018

If there's one thing that Joann Sfar's Gainsbourg told me, it's that he smoked...a lot. And sometimes, he didn't shave for a few days... However, this was about all the insight provided by Sfar's competent effort.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 5, 2018

The self-consciousness of identity, in the form of that puppet, inevitably gets in the way of the storytelling.

| Aug 30, 2018

Sfar is helped no end by an astonishing performance from Eric Elmosnino, who also performs many of the songs on the soundtrack.

| Nov 27, 2017

In conjoining Jewish heritage and classic French chanson, Gainsbourg celebrates the hybridity of contemporary French culture, while its combination of realist narrative and poetic animation make it both a touching biopic and an inspired musical.

| Jun 18, 2012

I love it when a film surprises me, and "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life" won me over in the very beginning and held me for the full 122 minutes because of its quirky passion and intelligence.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 17, 2012

It's a comic-strip version of one man's life and times, but it's tres cool.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 9, 2011

A cartoonist who created a graphic novel about Gainsbourg's life and who has now adapted it to the screen. The result is a film that's as playful as its subject matter although not nearly as provocative or complex.

| Nov 18, 2011

Overall, the film makes a common mistake: it tells what happened to Gainsbourg, but not who he really was.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 18, 2011

While the movie's on a roll, it's zesty, engaging and frisky.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 16, 2011

In short, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is a charmer.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 10, 2011

Very nearly as inventive and fascinating as it is frustrating.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 10, 2011

French pop star Serge Gainsbourg was as much iconoclast as icon, so it's fitting that this fanciful biopic is both affectionate and irreverent.

| Nov 4, 2011

Sfar, perhaps understandably, adores the legend of Serge Gainsbourg too much to make the whole nicotine-infused picture anything greater than what it is.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 4, 2011

Whatever its faults, it's better than Nine.

| Oct 28, 2011

Alas, "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life" loses steam and grows more perfunctory as it wears on.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 27, 2011

For better and for worse, Sfar's a fan, and his movie is a busy love letter to Gainsbourg that skates along the surface of the legend.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 27, 2011

Why was Gainsbourg a hero? The film leaves the question hanging. I am afraid it was only because, like Sinatra, he did it his way. Which no one can deny.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 27, 2011