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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Review

Other Critics provided by Metacritic.com

Critics scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.

  • 4.0
    65

    out of 100

    Metascore®
    Generally favorable reviews
    based on a weighted average of all
    critic review scores.

  • 63

    out of 100

    Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

    Artfully designed to appeal to lovers of romance and books, but by the end of the film I was not convinced it knew much about either.

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  • 70

    out of 100

    Variety David Stratton

    A visually lush and very Westernized vision of life in a remote Chinese village in the early 1970s.

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  • 70

    out of 100

    The New York Times Dana Stevens

    Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.

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  • 75

    out of 100

    Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

    Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.

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  • 80

    out of 100

    Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

    For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.

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  • 88

    out of 100

    Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

    An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.

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  • See all Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress reviews at Metacritic.com

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