Critic Reviews

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

  Not a masterwork perhaps, but certainly the work of a master, and, judging from the work of many of his young French disciples (including Leos Carax), one of his most influential features.

• Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

  Bresson, as always, holds on to that grace, gives us that beauty. While watching this great rapt film, with its hideous vision of a moral void, we almost can see light flickering in darkness, feel a spirit descending.

• Richard Brody, New Yorker

  Both the world and Bresson's cinema are in disarray, and the signs of his inner conflict are deeply troubling and tremendously moving.

• Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

  Hold on to something, Bresson implies, or you may fall in love with boredom itself. See it for the mood.

• , Time Out

  Its case is presented rather than argued: one buys its cosmic bleakness or one doesn't, but there is no doubt about the conviction with which it is put.

• Caryn James, New York Times

  No other director I can think of has come as close as Bresson to molding his players into what are, in effect, variations on a continuing personality, much the way a painter might.

• Jaime N. Christley, Slant Magazine

  Bresson's second-to-last film is not his bleakest, but it's probably his most plot-heavy, a droll tragedy about a young womanizer who contemplates, as many Bresson heroes and heroines have done before him, an exit strategy.

• Anton Bitel, Film4

  Bears all the hallmarks of Bresson's celebrated restraint, but it also shows its age, so failing to engage that, like its protagonist, you too will (probably) find yourself just wanting it to end.

• , TV Guide's Movie Guide

  Another rigorous -- and unusually watchable -- exercise in cinematic discipline by Bresson, the master of the minimal.

• Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid

  Bresson's most overtly political film.

• Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

  If nothing else, there's plenty of conviction in the telling of the grim story.

• Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

  I fear the movie has not aged well.

Read all 12 critic reviews