Metacritic reviews

While More Than Ever spends much of its time concerned with Hélène’s way of dealing with her illness, the film is a love story at heart.

With trademark stoicism and inscrutable poise, Krieps gives a performance that never tries to extract easy pity from the viewer or reach for low-hanging fruit.

Featuring superb turns from Vicky Krieps and the late Gaspard Ulliel - in his final role - as a couple facing the most difficult of choices, More Than Ever persuades, rather than forces, its audience to stare death in the face, and proves surprisingly life affirming in the process.

An affecting reflection on the loneliness we will all have to face at our end, held together by Vicky Krieps's poised display of unself-pitying despair and liberating acceptance.

This French and English-language drama is a film about taking ownership over the end of life; about dying personally and, if necessary, selfishly.

This is Krieps’ show, another elegantly virtuosic, intelligent turn that, in this case, imbues sickness with dignity so that every strained grasp for breath feels like a victory for autonomy.

Silence is Atef’s strength. The director impressively uses quiet moments to great effect.

Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.

The undersung director, Emily Atef, does well to make the business of dying, which can be the hoariest of cinematic subjects, feel like a fresh quandary here for two people making up the rules as they go along.

As demonstrated by the film’s final third, Atef evidently has a skill for crafting humane, sometimes contradictory characters and for drawing out compelling performances. And yet as interesting as the interpersonal drama should be, it might just leave you, as Monty Python would say, pining for the fjords.