CHILDREN OF PARADISE
  All Critics (41) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (40) | Rotten (1)
  To luxuriate in the film’s 3-hour, 10-minute length is to experience this masterpiece as it hasn’t been experienced since the day it opened.
 
  May 31, 2012 | Rating: 4/5
 
  Kenneth Turan
  Los Angeles Times
  TOP CRITIC
  Shot in 1943 during World War II, Children of Paradise overcame so many seemingly impossible obstacles that today the film seems enchanted.
 
  May 17, 2012 | Rating: 4/4
 
  Rene Rodriguez
  Miami Herald
  TOP CRITIC
  If you give this movie time to work on you, the elements that seem overly artificial or impossibly distant from our own time fade into insignificance, and you’re left with a complicated and wonderful romantic drama that’s full of surprises.
 
  March 8, 2012
 
  Andrew O’Hehir
  Salon.com
  TOP CRITIC
  Before French cinema reinvented itself with jump cuts and cool bobs, Marcel Carné’s 19th-century backstage drama was the epitome of good taste: a sumptuous spread of genteel sparring and epic heartache.
 
  March 6, 2012 | Rating: 5/5
 
  Joshua Rothkopf
  Time Out
  TOP CRITIC
  Marcel Carné’s towering intimate epic of early 19th-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time.
 
  March 6, 2012
 
  Melissa Anderson
  Village Voice
  TOP CRITIC
  Poetry with a capital “P,” sprinkled with fairy dust.
 
  March 5, 2012
 
  Richard Brody
  New Yorker
  TOP CRITIC
  Few films are as grandly romantic as Marcel Carne’s 1945 picture, a rich melodrama released at the height of French cinema’s Golden Age.
 
  February 23, 2022 | Rating: 4/4
 
  Brian Eggert
  Deep Focus Review
  ‘Children of Paradise’ is a complete fresco from a time in the Gallic country, in which beat mixed feelings, eternal passions, and above all, the joy of those children in the title beat. [Full Review in Spanish]
 
  April 17, 2020
 
  Alberto Abuín
  Espinof
  If acting and directing awards were given but once in a century, Carne, Barrault and Brasseur would still be nominees.
 
  January 24, 2020
 
  Merl Edelman
  Los Angeles Free Press
  Don’t skip this one if you can. I saw it in Paris and it remains one of the most memorable pictures I’ve seen.
 
  October 30, 2019
 
  Robert Ellis
  California Eagle
  Prevert’s script is simply a miracle… The photography is dramatic yet harmonious, the sound-track is subtle. Like the deacon’s wonderful one-hoss shay, it is all of a piece and every piece of it is of the best workmanship.
 
  July 12, 2019
 
  Dwight MacDonald
  Esquire Magazine
  A classic, a museum piece to the young, and to others inextricably linked with a particular time and atmosphere, barnacled with too many memories to be objectively assessed.
 
  January 29, 2019
 
  Isabel Quigly
  The Spectator…