There are many moving pieces and some things that don’t necessarily work so well, but all-in-all, I believe that the movie checks all the boxes necessary to call it a success.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 25, 2022

Dosch gives a brave performance and there’s an excellent soundtrack...

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 23, 2022

essentially a shallow examination of sexual obsession.

| Original Score: 11/20 | Feb 5, 2022

The actors are perfectly fine in their sketchy roles, the filmmaking is gracefully crafted. But Simple Passion is the classic case of a movie too invested in depicting sex to manage much of anything else...

| Jan 31, 2022

"Simple Passion" lets the bodies do the talking, and after a while, they run out of things to say.

| Jan 28, 2022

Dosch is remarkable. This is my first time seeing the French-Swiss actress, and now I want to go back now and catch up with everything she's done.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 25, 2022

While Dosch's work is ever-changing but always accessible, Polunin never comes close to matching her acting ability, which ultimately leaves Simple Passion lacking.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 21, 2022

While keeping a stalwart female perspective, "Simple Passion" follows an arc so standard it could be called banal.

| Jan 20, 2022

Arbid is practically edging viewers to feel the longing and desire which might stop at any moment; that is what makes this torrid romance so satisfying.

| Jan 20, 2022

The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux's story in its aesthetics.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 18, 2022

In Simple Passion the camera draws near...and from there, asks for another type of complicity. A coexistence with the image that doesn't start from the emotional projection... but also resides in the tangible. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 12, 2021

The film feels caught between the book's original nineties context and the present day's hyper-mediated and contentious landscape...

| Mar 16, 2021

It's a shame the tension created by their feverish pas de deux and the torturous aftermath is dissipated by the awful selection of non-diegetic pop songs added to the soundtrack.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 22, 2021

It's just as well, then, that Dosch's performance has intriguing shades and details. If you're a fan of intense French dramas, she gives you reason enough to see this one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 11, 2021

Simple Passion perfectly captures the giddy, heedless foolishness of infatuation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 10, 2021

There are painful echoes of Fifty Shades of Grey in the palpable lack of chemistry between Dosch and Polunin, and in the airless plotting about a woman at the mercy of her lover's timetable and her fiery passions.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 6, 2021

Laetitia Dosch is subtle and exquisite as a divorced Parisian lost in infatuation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2021

Although the pleasures of the flesh are shown with enough erotic power to convince us of Hélène's addiction to them, the anonymity of the lead characters stops the film from truly gripping.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 4, 2021

The film's about a chapter we prefer to get out of the way in adolescence; revisited as this kind of helpless mid-life crisis, it's exquisite torture.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2021

As a drama about the complex psychology of self-destructive desire, it's all bit arthouse 101.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 3, 2021