Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 18, 2011

What makes this slow, intense film so compelling is its persuasive creation of complex characters: You scarcely believe Moreau is an actor and that the film isn't, on some level, archival footage of the real painter.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2010

A naive, between-the-wars French painter is brought to vivid life in the satisfying fact-inspired drama Seraphine.

| Dec 17, 2009

Provost and cowriter Marc Abdelnour explore the mutable boundaries between spirituality, naivete, genius, and madness, showing how the two outsiders and polar opposites cultivated a mutual understanding.

| Dec 17, 2009

Séraphine is a deceptively subtle tale.

| Dec 4, 2009

This biopic, which swept the board at the Césaires, is somewhat over-inclined to reverence and simplification; but it is also, some of the time, rewarding and touching.

| Nov 27, 2009

Séraphine doesn't mess with the formula but the script allows plenty of awkward details to remain and we're allowed to decide for ourselves if fame was a godsend for her.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 27, 2009

Superb central performance in this original take on the art biopic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2009

This utterly beguiling biopic about a cleaning lady with the artistic gifts of a Van Gogh is just a bit special.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 27, 2009

A classy drama and a sympathetic portrait of two outsiders and the vibrant, unsettling work that binds them.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 27, 2009

A measured, soulful and tactile work; a film with gouache beneath its fingernails.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2009

A little long, but quietly rewarding.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2009

The film ends up something of a muddle that strives too hard to wear a 'quality' tag upon its sleeve.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2009

Moreau's stellar performance and the astral intensity of the paintings keep taking us where this story belongs, up into the skies.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2009

This charmingly different biopic is a quality treat.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2009

Séraphine, an outsider artist before the term was invented, is both a cautionary tale for contemporay artists of all and sundry media and a genuinely moving portrait of the artist as a young(ish) scullery maid.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 9, 2009

Seraphine is rare in its sympathetic focus on a laborer, yet refined in its execution.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 19, 2009

The film belongs to Moreau. Half-derided, half-protected by her village neighbors, her Séraphine is dowdy, willful, gruff, determined: a blend of singing mystic and muttering madwoman.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 14, 2009

Relies heavily on Moreau's gripping, continually surprising performance to effectively convey the oracular urgency and fractured, Dionysian mentality of Seraphine de Senlis and her work.

| Aug 8, 2009

Séraphine may be one of the spookiest, most unsettling films ever made about the hazy line between art and madness. That's a theme the movies have done to death, yet it finds new life in the title performance by Yolande Moreau.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 30, 2009