Metacritic reviews

Bennett is wonderful as always. Her ability to show strength through vulnerability is unparalleled.

From its eureka moment when Barbe-Nicole develops her iconic rose champagne to its final title cards about the company’s ongoing success, Widow Clicquot has all the same beats as the walk-and-talk business movie that you watched on your last flight. It would make perfect in-carriage entertainment for a drowsy Victorian family taking a long trip across the countryside.

In the end, Widow Clicquot is a drama about turning heartbreak and tragedy into something brighter, richer, and spilling over into good fortune. And it’s tastefully made too.

There was enough story here for an epic, but Napper chose to make a poem-like movie, one that sustains a tone of mystery and wonder from start to finish.

Bennett’s sensitive performance pulls us into her growing anguish and fear.

To say Bennett carries this film on her back is an understatement. She takes on the challenge of depicting romance, passion, grief, strength and perseverance.

The gender-driven power struggles in Widow Clicquot are in some ways the most conventional part of the film, which can soar in one moment and feel routine in the next.

Bennett lifts the story up just like the bubbles in the veuve's own delicious champagne, showing us the brilliance in this biopic drama.

An extraordinarily French story is flattened into conventional Euro-pudding nothingness. There is little here to surprise, less to even expect and still savour. The performers sometimes, but not always, outwit their material.

Ambitious as it is in scope, the film is also somewhat charmless and dour, caught between wanting to deliver the passion audiences expect from a period romance and constructing a suspenseful underdog tale. It’s too bad it never finds a winning balance.