Holy Motors is some kind of wonderful.
- Chase Whale, Film.com, December 21, 2012
This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.
- Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 2012
Holy Motors is wild and unfettered and playful - the work of an artist who carries his love of cinema in his bones, and knows how to share that affection with the audience.
- Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald, November 15, 2012
This is the most exhilarating cinema ride of 2012, a marvellously mobile mystery trip.
- Peter Howell, Toronto Star, November 15, 2012
In "Holy Motors" Carax insists on our other selves. His daylong ride is a wary celebration, a joyful dirge that's served up in concentrated form by a roving band of accordion players. It's all in a day's work.
- Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2012
As cryptic and unpredictable as that premise might suggest.
- Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, November 08, 2012
Lavant is splendid in the film, and he's essentially the entire film - and yet, "Holy Motors" is somewhat more than a contraption built for a fearless performer.
- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune, November 08, 2012
Here is a film that is exasperating, frustrating, anarchic and in a constant state of renewal. It's not tame.
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, November 08, 2012
I don't know what Lavant is playing here because I've never seen anything like it.
- Wesley Morris, Boston Globe, November 01, 2012
Leos Carax's surreal ode to ... identity? Movies? Performance? Identity and performance in movies, or movies and performance in identity, or some other combination that will come to mind upon further viewings?
- Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic, November 01, 2012
[A] crazy-beautiful reverie about movies, love, the love of movies, and the inevitability of human melancholy by the perpetually mysterious French filmmaker Léos Carax.
- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly, October 24, 2012
Carax produces the startling dislocations of reality that Buñuel pulled off, but without the gleeful wit.
- David Denby, New Yorker, October 22, 2012
If nothing else, you'll come out of it feeling perceptually refreshed, as if you'd just had a ride on an aesthetic and philosophical log flume.
- Dana Stevens, Slate, October 21, 2012
It's an exhilarating trip of movie madness and sadness.
- Richard and Mary Corliss, TIME Magazine, October 19, 2012
The sort of enigmatic movie that many critics embrace because it's open to endless interpretation ...
- Lou Lumenick, New York Post, October 19, 2012
It's the coolest and strangest movie of the year, and once it gets its druglike hooks in your brain, you'll never get them out again.
- Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com, October 18, 2012
Holy Motors, fueled by pure feeling, is a dream of a movie you want to get lost in.
- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, October 18, 2012
Each episode of director Leos Carax's film perfectly masters the exact tone of a different genre, finding precisely the saddest moment in each of its vignettes.
- Miriam Bale, New York Daily News, October 18, 2012
By the time this film's over, you're shaken, intrigued and reminded that art doesn't need to add up to be entrancing.
- Tom Long, Detroit News, January 24, 2013
All this random action, Carax suggests, is for some vast, abstract audience anxious to lose itself in imagined narratives.
- Tom Keogh, Seattle Times, November 22, 2012