Two beautifully modulated central performances and an accomplished sense of pacing are undone by the weary drone of familiarity in this lovelorn French melodrama from the writer-director Arnaud Desplechin.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 16, 2018

Don't be put off by the subtitles - this is one of the great modern teen movies.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 15, 2018

Desplechin's film-making language is always fluent and rich.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 15, 2018

This quasi-autobiographical trilogy is further proof that AD is the Proust of modern French cinema.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 14, 2018

Impeccably staged and played, this scattershot reflection on the follies, glories and regrets of youth pays affectionate tribute to a world of handwritten letters and payphones that has all but disappeared.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2018

My Golden Days isn't perfect, but much like memories of our own youth, I'm not entirely certain it is meant to be, and as such the film becomes a far more emotionally powerful endeavor because of this.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 11, 2016

The easiest way to describe "My Golden Days" is as a coming-of-age romance, but Arnaud Desplechin's film, with its memories and carefully nursed grudges and moments of heartbreak and betrayal, feels weightier than that.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 14, 2016

The details - some funny, some intensely painful - of Paul and Esther's relationship over the years have a cumulative power that isn't diminished by a few loose ends.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 14, 2016

Desplechin draws uniformly superb performances from his young cast, making the coming-of-age genre seem fresh and vital.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 8, 2016

While the ghosts of teen romances past no doubt hover over many of us, after a while you might find yourself wanting to slap Paul Dedalus across the face.

| Original Score: C | Apr 8, 2016

Dense, lyrical, and polymorphous.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 7, 2016

My Golden Days is ostensibly a prequel to My Sex Life, but more so, it's in conversation with all of Desplechin's films. That's what gives this film an extra emotional heft and the fizzy disorientation of "I remember this rabbit hole."

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 7, 2016

...you don't need to see "My Sex Life" to enjoy "My Golden Days," which is wonderful by merit for several reasons, including young stars...

| Original Score: 3.5 | Apr 7, 2016

There are some perceptive passages dealing with the infuriating inconstancy of young love, and a few pointed scenes featuring the adult Paul (played by Mathieu Amalric), but overall this overlong movie is too knowingly coy for its own good.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 1, 2016

Wonderfully evocative, funny, sad, complex, and essential passages from a man's childhood and adolescence.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 1, 2016

Desplechin presents the high schoolers' relationships with an adult complexity, from which the grown-up Paul seems to stand back in awe.

| Mar 31, 2016

The movie masterfully crystallizes the unruly, episodic nature of memories, re-creating the way certain small things stay with us while other, much larger events recede into a haze of cigarette smoke.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 31, 2016

Will My Golden Days... come to be considered a classic? I'd like to think so, and not only because of the film's winning grace and buoyancy.

| Mar 24, 2016

The movie runs along a well-worn groove, both in its fealty to adolescent sorrows and in its stout conviction that cigarettes constitute a major food group. As in all Desplechin films, however, surprises are continually sprung ...

| Mar 21, 2016

"My Golden Days" exists simultaneously within and outside of its characters' headspace, a testament to Deplechin's powers of imaginative sensitivity.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 18, 2016