A Radiant Girl

"There’s plenty to engage in A Radiant Girl, not least a performance by Rebecca Marder which more than delivers on the luminous promise of the English title."

"Between Marder's exquisite performance and Kiberlain's powerful yet subdued storytelling, radiant is the perfect word to summarise the writer-director's feature debut."

"Kiberlain presents an adeptly conceived character portrait contained in just the right way to remain chillingly effective and memorable."

"Marder does indeed live up to the film’s title as the infectiously vivacious Irene, and “A Radiant Girl” is laced with enlivening bursts of creativity.... Making the most of a moment isn’t only a skill of Kiberlain’s, but a means of survival in “A Radiant Girl” when it’s clear there’s no assurances of how long it’ll last."

"Rebecca Marder is marvelous in the leading role of Irene and delivers a star-making performance in A Radiant Girl."

"A masterfully assembled coming-of-age that falls in love, enchants, unsettles, and breaks your heart."

"A Radiant Girl offers a chilling look at fascism’s accumulating evil in a way that lulls its audience into a sense of complacency — a pointed mirroring — and then pierces right straight through the heart when it’s least expected."

"Marder is a radiant actress, her face an open book. She plays Irène as a young woman with joie de vivre and excitement, and perhaps some willful blindness about the political situation around her. Part of what differentiates A Radiant Girl from other holocaust dramas is that Kiberlain is less interested in telegraphing future harm than she is in showing the psychological impacts of even small losses of civil liberties. "

"Sandrine Kiberlain’s début feature, A Radiant Girl... contains sparkling moments of illumination where the historical context of Paris in the summer of 1942 enters into a dialogue with lines by Marivaux from 1740, as well as a coming-of-age tale that is as old and new as theatre itself."