hat tone of stillness wrapped around small plotlines of disquiet plods to limit most dramatic impact to mere slightness.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 14, 2024

A stirring World War I era story bathed in humanity and told through great performances, emotive faces and quiet communication.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

[A]n elegant portrait of everyday life in an era plagued by devastation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 9, 2021

For those looking for a change of pace, place and focus, The Guardians offers a sensitive and gorgeous portrayal of a war-time experience which is often overlooked, but no less devastating.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 30, 2020

Full of the sleepy rhythms of rural life, this beautiful-looking French drama has a powerful story of emancipation stitched into its period garb.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2020

It's handled with sobriety and a certain prudence when approaching its social treatise on the condition of the peasant working class, but at times it lacks depth. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jul 18, 2020

Despite its stakes, the movie never feels overblown as a drama, with each actor delivering measured performances for heartbreaking effect.

| Jun 15, 2020

A story of women waiting for their soldiers to return, this unfolds in fairly predictable fashion, though the film's solemnity is seductive.

| Apr 8, 2020

Beauvois demonstrates how the Great War not only changed people's relationships with each other, but how it altered the core of their relationship to their native land.

| Apr 20, 2019

The consequences of the war. Woman as a leaders of the society. About feminist when people does not know its meaning. A masterpiece. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2018

The rich and wondrous tapestry of rural life is brought to the screen in glorious hues.

| Oct 30, 2018

The Guardians is an icy tale of injustice, war, love, despair, and adaptability, which unfolds serenely yet assuredly with attentive period detail.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 12, 2018

Set in a quiet corner of France, The Guardians is a study of women, often mothers, daughters, and sisters, on the home front during World War I as they combat the everyday and the uncertainty often brought with conflict.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 27, 2018

Almost too self-consciously beautiful, The Guardians creates a picturesque trope of rural France during World War I.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 25, 2018

The Guardians is a subtle, beautifully made and quietly feminist work about the fortitude of women during wartime.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 21, 2018

A pleasing Sunday-afternoon wallow - but not a transcendent one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 20, 2018

[A] spare, painterly first world war drama...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2018

Every frame of Beauvois's film looks like a painting come to life, and the performances, from Bry and Baye in particular, are superb.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2018

A powerful and emotional experience that entrenches us in the textured lives of compelling characters and shines a light on an aspect of wartime drama rarely explored.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2018

Like an 18th-century novel, it's fascinating, incredibly detailed and a bit too long.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 17, 2018