Metacritic reviews

Binoche’s naturalistic performance marries itself beautifully to the ensemble while grounding, in reality, a character unbelievable, yet true.

It’s particularly perceptive when it comes to the ethics of using real lives as material, and the question of the legitimacy of emotional bonds if one party is hiding essential truths about themselves.

Although Binoche is the film’s star, her presence is smartly muted, allowing us time and space to discover the world as she does, and providing room for complexity in considering the ethics of his character’s work and of Carrère’s film itself.

Even when the film becomes something like a spy thriller, it never loses sight of its political themes.

Between Two Worlds is highly self-aware, at some points simply playing up the odd dissonance of seeing as glamorous a figure as Juliette Binoche scrubbing toilets, and at other points making more caustic commentary on the impossible task the book and adaptation set out to accomplish.

Its predictability doesn’t break Between Two Worlds, but it does soften the blows it intends to deliver.

The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.

Neither of the two worlds of the film’s English title is illuminated clearly enough

Despite the nobility of its intentions and commitment of its cast, this would-be treatise on gig economical iniquity winds up patronising the very ‘invisible people' it's supposed to be championing.

Marianne may learn to “pass” for a cleaner – kind of – but she can never experience the precariousness faced by her subjects. Her idea that these people are entirely invisible is bogus from the get-go. The script wrestles with these problems but it simply cannot overcome them.