A quiet but powerful tale of grief, family love, and the mysterious world of childhood friendship.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2024

Petite Maman is a sweet, tender, and fairytale-esque film that focuses on grief and escapism during your childhood. Even though it is only 72-minutes long, it is wholly enchanting and poignant.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 8, 2024

Sciamma’s handling of the interactions between the kids is as confident and as beautifully realized as the depiction of relationships in Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood.

| Nov 8, 2023

There are some hard adult truths, but the film is so filled with little notes of grace and tenderness that it leaves us with the sense that the world has much more wonder than sadness, more connection that isolation, more hope than cynicism.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 6, 2023

Sciamma embraces time travel without the sci-fi world-building and creates a ghost story using the living. By taking fear out of these genres and turning them into quotidian and poignant experiences, Sciamma erases fear from death and loss.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Fans of Celine Sciamma are sure to delight in the beauty and power of Petite Maman. If you’re looking for a soft, heartwarming film that knows how to pack an emotional punch, you won’t be disappointed in this film.

| Original Score: 90/100 | Aug 10, 2023

This slow-moving ode to childhood friendships and parental relationships is not for everyone, but for those who connect with it, it’s something special. In a word, Petite Maman is tender.

| Jul 25, 2023

This ephemeral wisp of a movie is almost like a dream, not that is uses dream logic, but in the way that it's so delicately beautiful that it feels like it could just waft away.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 29, 2023

Petite Maman offers a portrait of curiosity, contemplation and warmth.

| May 15, 2023

Despite working on a smaller canvas, Sciamma’s Petite Maman explores loss in a much more tangible way as she delivers another masterfully crafted portrait that examines the mother-daughter relationship with elegance and grace.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 31, 2023

With a dash of magical realism, Petite Maman invites us to imagine what we would ask our mothers, and what they would tell us, if we could suspend, just for a moment, the unspoken rules of the parent-child relationship.

| Dec 27, 2022

Relentlessly touching...

| Dec 23, 2022

Céline Sciama’s follow up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire exemplifies the power of short, but emotionally satisfying storytelling without ever sacrificing poignant observation in the process.

| Original Score: A+ | Dec 4, 2022

Petite Maman is a little slice of cinematic heaven. C’est vraiment magnifique.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 12, 2022

Much like its predecessor, Petite’s cinematography takes full advantage of light and color to add texture to the story in ways that extend far beyond the performances alone.

| Sep 26, 2022

We all long to understand each other better, especially those closest to us who feel as though they’re pulling lightyears away.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 22, 2022

Petite Maman is yet another intimately emotional epic from Céline Sciamma, who masterfully explores the relationship between mother and daughter.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Céline Sciamma works magic in Petite Maman, a film that returns to the realm of childhood.

| Aug 23, 2022

Petite Maman is a pithy, gemlike film.

| Aug 5, 2022

This unsentimental film evokes tenderness and heartbreak in what children can never know about a parent, and what a gift it is to imagine glimpsing that precious unknowable, even for a moment.

| Aug 4, 2022