“The difficulty of knowing what is true, of discovering what really happened, ripples throughout Alain Resnais’s Stavisky — a spell-casting mood piece [that] despite its mystifications, is one of the most rewarding films I’ve seen this year — and also one of the
most intelligent.”
— Nora Sayre, The New York Times (1974)

“To play Stavisky, Renais chose Jean-Paul Belmondo, and it's perfect casting. There's something in Belmondo's screen personality that fundamentally suggests the con man. It was there in the jauntiness of his first movie, Breathless, and in Cartouche, a movie totally unlike this one except for Belmondo's cocky bravado in the face of certain defeat Belmondo has grown and become more subtle in 15 years, and in Stavisky, he gives us his most complex and probably his best performance.”
— Roger Ebert