In short, this is not a movie about movies. It is a movie about the luminous look on Clémence’s face, as she sits in a café, in suffused morning light, too flustered by the night she just spent with a boy to order a cup of coffee; and about the face of her sister Valentine, as she bathes in the milky waters of a natural spring, on an Italian vacation—a vision of liquid calm, except for an undertow of fear, and the thought that she could easily slip under, like Ophelia in the weeping brook. (Compare Grégoire on the fate of the company: “We’re sinking.”) It takes a female director, I think, to catch children, young and old, at these fragile hours, and also to trace a residue of something childlike in their elders. Grégoire recalls “a house devoid of women,” on a melancholy trip to see his father, and the whole film, you could say, offers motherly—and daughterly—compensation for that loss. Movies are impossible to make, and they ruin you, but children run and run.

Anthony Lane, “Family Matters”