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

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

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

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

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

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

Beauvois's vision of the period is totally convincing, and his depiction of hardscrabble farm life rings with a quiet vibrancy...

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

The beauty and the pathos of the film are vivid in every frame.

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

The Guardians is a rewarding and rich film, which offers a delicately considered and often troubling insight into the lives of those left behind by history.

| Aug 16, 2018

From its slow-burning beginning, The Guardians develops into an epic melodrama. It's a wartime story in which, for a change, the men are relegated to supporting roles.

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

It's not just visual beauty that this film rejoices in. It's some kind of primal story force. It's calendar art, plus calendar power: the sense of history's turning pages.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 15, 2018

Like the cinematic equivalent of slow food, "The Guardians" is a rich, simmering cassoulet of a film, one that asks viewers to adjust their metabolisms accordingly.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 20, 2018

Presents the dailiness of farm life through its seasons with an unhurried grace.

| Original Score: A | May 18, 2018

The performances are extraordinary, as they often are in Beauvois' films, with Baye a study in quiet suffering and Bry wonderfully enigmatic - seemingly simple, but hinting at a soul capable of expansion and adaptation.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 15, 2018

Elegantly made and quietly emotional, a family story filled with characters whose lives we sink into, feeling the hope, the sadness, the sorrow and the joy right along with those on the screen.

| May 10, 2018

Imagine devoting several years, as Mr. Beauvois did, to making a reflective, bucolic feature that is organized around the themes of community and evolving culture. It's all too subtle for words, but perfect for moving pictures.

| May 8, 2018

Like a series of Monet paintings come to life, the historical drama The Guardians luxuriates in lush, widescreen images of the French countryside.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 4, 2018

Pialat has honored an entire category of war heroes whose stories are seldom told. Where America has Rosie the Riveter as its poster girl for the women who pitched in during WW2, France can now point to "The Guardians" with pride.

| May 4, 2018

In Xavier Beauvois's latest feature, his understated, visually compelling storytelling unfolds with patient precision.

| May 3, 2018

Ms. Baye, one of the great living French screen actresses, is steely and magnificent, even as it is Ms. Bry who finally captures the film's energy and the sympathy of the audience.

| May 3, 2018