This well-acted, wonderfully photographed biopic explores the troubled life of French feminist author Violette Leduc and her complicated ties to Simone de Beauvoir...

| Jun 30, 2020

She [Emmanuelle Devos] gives a tremendous performance, somehow managing to turn an emotion as ugly as self-loathing into something beautiful to behold.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 3, 2014

[Leduc] remains a small and rather irritating sideshow to the more powerful St Germain crowd, and the focus on her life is surprisingly dull.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 3, 2014

For all the chaos and pain, it is weirdly romantic: a glorious tale of wish-fulfilment, confirming that writers really can attain self-validation through the pen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 2, 2014

A beautiful true-life character study that does elegant justice to a largely unheralded writer.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 2, 2014

A deeply satisfying combination of fascinating subject, ace performers and refined directorial sensibility.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 2, 2014

"Violette" demonstrates how suffering produces great art, and that the artist isn't the only one who suffers for it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 21, 2014

It's a perfect approach to Leduc, whose work is so grounded in the messy, fleshy realities of life, it scandalized critics with its frank treatment of taboo subjects such as lesbianism and incest.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 18, 2014

A literate, leisurely and lovely telling of one woman's attempt to find what Virginia Woolf famously called "a room of one's own."

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 10, 2014

So compelling, even thrilling, in its frank depictions of female sexual voracity, professional egotism and twisted variants on the Electra complex that it's easy to overlook [its] shaggy, uneven plotting.

| Jun 26, 2014

Movies about the literary process can prove problematic. The act of writing is a solitary one. Yet "Violette" mostly avoids the pitfalls associated with movies about writers by limiting the scenes of Violette scribbling furiously in a notebook.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 26, 2014

Yes, her capacity for such deeply wretched feelings is necessary to her art; the film succeeds at convincing us of that. But it doesn't inspire a lot of sympathy for a woman who is so clearly the author of her own misery.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 26, 2014

A strong account of a literary friendship, a case of two opposites attracting, even if the nature of the attraction was different on each side.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 26, 2014

Few films have conveyed with such understanding about how a creative soul taps into all that interior turmoil and then somehow shape these thoughts into artful prose that can scald and heal.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 25, 2014

Frank, harsh, emotionally harrowing and, much like its subject, difficult.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 19, 2014

Provost is attracted to "outsider" women whose lives are indistinguishable from their art.

| Original Score: B | Jun 13, 2014

Violette's hold on life can be terrifying, at times ugly, but what she finally makes of that life is beautiful.

| Jun 12, 2014

Everything Leduc does in the film, apart from write, makes her look like a walking nightmare, though her awful behavior is clearly meant to be justified by her artistry.

| Original Score: C- | Jun 12, 2014

Leduc is an author worth knowing about, but this is a character only an already-established fan could love.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 12, 2014

It's a movie about coming to peace with solitude, leagues beyond most biopics.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 11, 2014