The stunning design, vivid candy colours and Catherine Deneuve's ethereal performance only add to the fairy-tale qualities of the haunting love story between a teenage shop girl and a garage attendant.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 6, 2024

It’s one of the best movies to come out of the 1960s, a devastating almost romance compete with some of the most gut-wrenching musical numbers you’re ever likely to see.

| Jul 20, 2023

It is all so sweet, so sentimental, so artsy, so craftsy, so pretty, so pretentious, so abysmally simple-minded.

| Aug 15, 2022

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is something rare nowadays: a film which gives the impression of having been made with joy.

| Aug 8, 2022

Effortlessly romantic but also hauntingly bittersweet.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 10, 2022

Though the scenario adopts the styling of a tragedy, the music stays consistently peppy, never quite giving in to the dramatic sincerity of the seemingly doomed couple.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 27, 2020

The perfect collision of bold cinematic style, warmly-embraced melodrama, and emotional precision.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 16, 2020

A sweeping love story about a young romance succumbing to the stark realities of life and the inevitability of growing up.

| Aug 6, 2020

It has one of the best endings in all of cinema - if it doesn't break your heart, nothing will.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 26, 2020

Charm may be in the eye of the beholder, but if you don't find this movie irresistible, you should get your eyesight checked.

| Apr 6, 2020

What makes Les Parapluies a delight is its almost total involvement with the cinematic medium; its delight in color, movement and gesture; the making of fantasy out of the most common objects of modern existence.

| Feb 5, 2020

Yet the hits, when they come, are immense.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 9, 2019

Deneuve brings to the film her own subtly erotic discontent and muted sadness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2019

The film boasts music by Michel Legrand and token gusts of New Wave realism, lightened and made lithe for a lighter-footed genre. (The heroine loves a car mechanic.) Add colour photography to dazzle.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 4, 2019

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg affixes its gaze on the fairy-tale notion that true love will conquer all, but instead it offers a sobering view on broken hearts and how we survive such ordeals and become stronger.

| Sep 30, 2019

It's a lovely movie.

| Jun 27, 2019

Demy sends his two lovers soaring before bringing them back to earth, and the effect is at once wise, rapturous, and heartrending. It's pure perfection.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 4, 2019

The candy colored sets suggests the great Hollywood musicals: bright, clean, a utopian world, but with a distinctly French flavor. Instead of elaborate numbers we get intimate staging where every movement becomes like a dance...

| Mar 2, 2018

Demy's pragmatic, hopeful message is that our heartbreak and sadness are, like our joy, just things we take with us.

| Apr 1, 2017

What's so overpoweringly beautiful about The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg is that it matches human-scaled feelings of regret with the color and intensity of the movies Demy loved as a boy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 28, 2014