[The Young Girls of Wilko] is ironically elegiac, one of Andrzej Wajda's least vehement and most beautiful films….

It is a film about lost opportunities and missed chances, of delicate undercurrents of the sort generally best left to literature. The shadowy, distant, and possibly affectless Wiktor never completely reveals himself to anyone; it is likely that his attraction is his emptiness—it can contain whatever those who love him wish to project.

Elliott Stein, "Reports from the New York Film Festival: 'The Young Girls of Wilko'" (copyright © 1979 by Elliott Stein; reprinted by permission of the author), in Film Comment, Vol. 15, No. 6, November-December, 1979, p. 67.