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11/24/07
The Last Mistress (2008)
78 %
Reviews Counted: 72 Fresh: 56 Rotten:16 Average Rating: 6.7/10
Consensus:
More complicated than your average bodice ripper, Catherine Breillat's Last Mistress features beautiful costumes, wrought romances, and a feral performance from Argento.
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hr 54 mins
Theatrical Release: Jun 27, 2008 Limited
Box Office: $621,567
Synopsis: Controversial director Catherine Breillat (ROMANCE, FAT GIRL) delivers her most ambitious film yet with THE LAST MISTRESS. Adapted from the novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, the film is set in 19th-century France, when the world was a seemingly much more innocent place. Underneath the... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Asia Argento, Fu'ad Ait Aattou, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute, Yolande Moreau
Reviews
Top Critic
While the story may creak, the performances do not; a wonderful cast breathes life into the characters %u2026 Strangely unsatisfying, the film nevertheless looks superb and Breillat's direction is fluid, aided by top notch editing and a great score
11/09/07
Top Critic
What makes the movie ineluctably compelling is Argento's fire in the title role.
08/15/08
A dispassionate autopsy of a passionate triangle, brilliantly devised if not always perfectly executed.
08/10/08
It's characteristic of the virtues and limitations of French sexual provocateur Catherine Breillat...that they usually derive from the same source--the fearless determination to skirt the borders of camp.
08/01/08
Cool, carnal, and lethal, The Last Mistress is a period drama with a difference.
07/25/08
There's a brittle pomp and circumstance to The Last Mistress, which suddenly turns into a sensual witch's dance, once star Asia Argento is let loose about a third of the way into the film.
07/25/08
Despite an austere budget and some minor anachronisms, The Last Mistress proves that Breillat has found something in the luscious language of the 19th century that makes sense to us today.
07/25/08
The cynicism and fire of the film all emerges from the heat of Asia Argento. In giving a truly fearless performance as the title character, she uses her body and audacity to tweak the upper-class society that can't take their eyes off her.
07/21/08
Asia Argento, as Vellini, is a firebrand, a woman who is attractive even in non-seductive moments when she is angry or downcast or 'off-stage.'
07/21/08
Aattou plays his role with the supreme self-confidence of a man in control, his deep blue eyes radiating calm, but Argento seems to know better. She is a wild, physical force, a primal fury who could only be resisted if she were to allow it.
07/18/08
[Breillat's] latest and possibly most entertaining exercise in erotica.
07/18/08
The Last Mistress is grindingly predictable, its view of sex as hand-to-hand combat (the lovers here assault each other like Sumo wrestlers) is often unintentionally funny and the casting is all wrong.
07/18/08
[Breillat] is inviting us to really look at sex as it occurs in life, and to engage with it mentally, as a driving mystery of human existence.
07/18/08
The sex, like almost everything else in The Last Mistress, is mechanical.
07/18/08
It is Claude Sarraute's performance that I love most of all in the film. I can easily imagine spending the night in the salon of this old lady, and telling her everything she wants to hear.
07/18/08
Top Critic
Related Forums
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
Review: Fiery, sexual performance by Asia Argento in 'The Last Mistress'
by: lovelacy 7/21
by: lovelacy 7/21
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