It was entered into the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize and the award for Best Screenplay.
Richard Bernstein of The New York Times was unfavorable toward the work; he stated that there were "extraordinary scenes", but argued that "when the end comes, the viewer is left [...] with the vague unsettled feeling that, aside from gaining the knowledge that exile is emptiness, two and a half hours in the presence of much onscreen joylessness has produced little satisfaction."
"[3] A reviewer for Time Out was mixed, writing, "The first half of the film [...] is suffused with that peculiar melancholy which Angelopoulos has made entirely his own.
One begins to lose the thread in the second half, however, when the old man and his wife are cast adrift on a symbolic voyage to Cythera, birthplace of Aphrodite".
[7] In the book A History of Greek Cinema, Vrasidas Karalis referred to Voyage to Cythera as one of the best films of its decade.