The Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du ballon rouge) Critic Reviews

Because it's one of the most beautiful films ever. Because it's a work of art on the order of a poem by Yeats or a painting by Rothko.Read the full review

Juliette Binoche is outstanding as a wildly untogether single mother who parks her son with a French-speaking Chinese nanny while she whirls and worries.Read the full review

The camera is so unobtrusive and the acting so naturalistic that it takes a while for a narrative to emerge. When it finally does, you're surprised to find you're deeply invested in the characters.Read the full review

In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.Read the full review

What Mr. Hou has done is borrow power and some gentle intimations of a state of grace from one of the most enchanting images in movie history.Read the full review

The subject is the privileged state of childhood itself - how we're all lucky to have had it and how it so easily floats away from our grasp.Read the full review

This eloquent study of loneliness and postmodern drift likely will be received with more admiration than rapture by the helmer's followers. But Juliette Binoche's turn as a harried single mom and pic's enlivening portrait of domestic rupture make this a highly accessible Hou.Read the full review