Benedetta

The film relishes that sort of impious thinking in a colourful, mordant tale.

The ceremonial restraint that defines contemporary mainstream lesbian romances like Carol and Disobedience is here abandoned with, well, abandon. ... To add to the viewers distress, the picture is as deafeningly loud as it is tiresomely provocative.

Lurches between entertainingly camp and shamelessly lurid.

In Benedetta, master provocateur Paul Verhoeven demolishes the line between the sacred and the profane.

It could only be more deeply Paul Verhoeven if RoboCop strode in to take the veil.

A funny, filthy, iconoclastic riot. Paul Verhoeven’s latest erotic satire won’t be for all creeds, but it is bursting with enough ideas that even doubters can find something to believe in here.

What’s most intriguing in the film is its sycophantic religious politics — not the romance. The politicking and faux puritanism are executed cogently, often more riveting than its other parts.

With a classic style that's almost baroque, Paul Verhoeven delivers a delirious journey that's a little wild and exaggerated. [Full review in Spanish]

Verhoeven uses blasphemy like a butterfly knife to pierce the hypocritical doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.

Benedetta is much slacker, shot mostly on loosely handheld digital, and its early Renaissance world is a little perceptibly threadbare...at times it weirdly resembles a lackluster Monty Python and the Holy Grail.