"Nothing matters to Philippe Garrel but the image, the beauty of the image and the motions within it. His art recaptures the great dream of the silent film, fusing the virtues of music and painting for pure enjoyment, for secret pleasure. There are four actors: two men (Lou Castel and Jacques Bonnaffé) and two women (Anne Wiazemsky and Mireille Perrier); plus two more (the filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Jacques Doillon), as well as the absent ones, the history of cinema yesterday and today (Andy Warhol, Jean Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard expressly mentioned, but also Dreyer, Bresson, and all the others since Méliès)." Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde
"As befits a filmmaker for whom art and life are inextricably intertwined, Garrel frequently returns to exploring the passage between the two. Here the relationship between a young director and his subject (the sunlights of the title refers to the film lights on a set) is refracted through a film-within-a-film as well as through a series of troubling dreams." Metrograph New York
