The Artist: Critic Reviews

As it opens, we're watching an audience watch a silent adventure film, and in a funny way we spend the rest of the movie watching ourselves get swept up in conventions we can see through.

This is not a work of film history but rather a generous, touching and slightly daffy expression of unbridled movie love.

The happy ending had me on my feet cheering throughout the final credits. I can't wait to see it again.

In a time when movies often are sonic assaults, and meaning can be lost amid the clatter of explosions, gunshots and screeching cars, The Artist has an utterly beguiling purity.

Michel Hazanavicius's black-and-white throwback to cinema's silent era may seem steeped in fusty nostalgia, but it glitters and gleams with utterly of-the-moment wit and romantic zest.

"The Artist'' is a small, exquisitely-cut jewel in a style everyone assumes is 80 years out of date.

An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist will probably be the most successful silent movie since the days of the Gish sisters. It might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen.

"The Artist" should appeal to anyone willing to take a chance.

Illustrates the movie medium's deathless pleasures.

The Artist is charming as all get-out, a delightful little movie about the movies.

A silent movie shot in sumptuous black-and-white, no less. A silent flick made with not a jot of distancing winking, but instead born of a heady affection for a bygone, very bygone, era of filmmaking.

Unfettered by irony, inspiring the kind of spontaneous emotional response we yearn for at the multiplex, [it] immerses us in joyful illusion, a world of movies within movies.

What Hazanavicius has wrought is damnably clever, but not cute; less like an arch conceit and more like the needle-sharp recollection of a dream.

Yes, it's virtually silent, it's black-and-white, and you might not know the leads. But if you don't take a chance on this film, we can't be friends any more.

Is "The Artist" a screwball comedy? A sentimental melodrama? A spoof? Serious? What? Yes, yes, yes and yes.

This effort often manages to duplicate the magical pantomime of the era; a lovely scene in which Bejo drapes herself in the arms of a hung jacket as if it were a human lover could have come straight out of a Marion Davies picture.

Strangely, wonderfully, The Artist feels as bold and innovative a moviegoing experience as James Cameron's bells-and-whistles Avatar did a couple of years ago.

It's a rocket to the moon fueled by unadulterated joy and pure imagination.

The Artist is the most surprising and delightful film of 2011.

"The Artist" is such an engaging, delightful film that, if you like movies, you will walk out of the theater with a smile. You just will; it's that inspired.

The Artist is so wonderful that the audience applauds everything, including the dog.

Dujardin turns his impeccable imitation skills on a host of early film stars, combining Rudolph Valentino's smoldering appeal and slicked-back hair with Errol Flynn's panache and pencil moustache, while preserving an essential sincerity in the process.

Literally the kind of movie they just don't make anymore...

You can't fault it as smart entertainment, which eschews parody to make a sincere tribute that also serves as cogent current commentary.

A cheeky trifle whose present-day novelty of being, well, silent and black-and-white carries it a long way.