If The Artist truly were from the period it’s about, it would be a minor film that occasionally played on TCM at 3AM, and about which even hardcore silent film fans wouldn’t care much.
– Devin Faraci, Badass Digest

Call me Hazana-vicious, but this movie seemed to me to be 100 minutes of slick-looking, engaging, ebullient song and dance in service of… what, exactly? There’s the rub. You may smile and smile, and be a villain.
– Jeffery Overstreet, Filmwell

There’s a reason why there has only been one silent film made since the 1930s. And that reason is that they are excruciating to sit through. They are passé and their appeal is strictly esoteric.
– Tony Medley

Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist neatly sidesteps this unsolvable dilemma by ignoring everything that’s fascinating and memorable about the era, focusing instead on a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn’t even qualify as a roman à clef.
– Jaime N. Christley, Slant Magazine