Mr. Hulot is off for a week by the sea… Spend it with him… Don’t look for a plot, for holiday is meant purely for fun… If you look for it, you will find more fun in ordinary life than in fiction… So relax and enjoy yourselves… See how many people you can recognize. You might even recognize yourself.
»When has a film so subtly and yet so completely captured nostalgia for past happiness? The movie is about the simplest of human pleasures: the desire to get away for a few days, to play instead of work, to breathe in the sea air, and maybe meet someone nice. It is about the hope that underlies all vacations, and the sadness that ends them. And it is amused, too, that we go about our days so intently, while the sea and the sky go about theirs. /…/ It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but Mr. Hulot's Holiday gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular.«
– Roger Ebert
»Popular films that are also works of art are rare gems, and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday remains one of the artistic jewels in movie comedy. It is as great in its way as the best of Chaplin and Keaton. A radically different way of experiencing the world. it is such an unpretentious movie that it initially comes across as anything but radical. /…/ By the end of the film, Hulot’s hilarious mishaps have affected everyone else’s holiday for better and for worse, and affected our own sense of vacationing as well. /…/ The first of Tati’s Hulot comedies, it represents the best possible introduction to the great director’s charm as well as his art. And it is the definitive look at the lighter side of summer vacations.«
– Jonathan Rosenbaum
»Jacques Tati’s 1953 masterpiece features some of the funniest and loveliest slapstick imaginable, yet it is also a work of impressive formal innovation, casting off the tyranny of a plotline in favor of loosely associated tones, episodes, and images.«
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader