Critic Reviews

A gorgeous color palette and a tactile sensitivity to the emotions and intelligence of rural people help to create an organic work that integrates brilliant casting, yummy production and costume design, and fine cinematography.

The story offers many opportunities for glibness and sentimentality. Walsh falls for none of them. She enhances the grimness of Lewis’s surroundings, but does not exploit it.

This is a remarkably assured movie, through and through. Walsh and cinematographer Guy Godfree have taken care to make every individual shot a thing of beauty. But the artfulness always acts in service of the emotions, which in the end become both inspiring and heartbreaking.

Maudie is one of the most beautiful and life-affirming and uplifting movies of the year, capable of moving us to tears of appreciation for getting to know the title subject.

Hawke is good at playing bad, but Hawkins is better, rendering, in Maudie, a portrait of a woman that feels raw, real and revelatory.

What shines through is the beauty of Guy Godfree’s cinematography — the light has a lovely, soft stillness to it, like a painting — and a remarkable performance by Hawkins, whose impossibly wide smile seems to bring the sun.

Maudie is a work of art.

Unlike the thick directness in Maud’s work, the movie about her is almost pointillist in detailing the tiny steps that make up an enduring marriage.

The film glows with the kind of sweetness last seen in John Crowley’s "Brooklyn." All it asks of you is an open heart.

The only fireworks here are of the indoor kind, but this sensitive, beautifully acted film lingers long after the final frame. And the Newfoundland locations are breathtaking.