The film does maintain a powerful mood throughout, a kind of stringency, and the fate of the humans fades into insignificance as the film draws to a bleak close.
Comment
05/30/08
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
100
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:28
Fresh:28
Rotten:0
Average Rating:9.1/10
Synopsis: Often praised as one of the greatest films ever made, but long unavailable in the United States, AU HASARD BALTHAZAR is suffused with the same religious imagery and themes that mark much of... [More]
Reviews for Au Hasard Balthazar
Top CriticIf you can see past the heavy-handed religious overtones you will encounter an inspired and deeply intelligent Bresson classic.
04/27/09
Top CriticPerhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.
04/27/09
likely as lost on today's audience as the saintly donkey that bears man's burdens on his back only to be beaten, neglected and, finally, rejected.
07/22/08
It's a study of human weakness and cruelty, it's a portrait of Christ the suffering servant, it's the heartbreaking story of a young girl's descent from innocence to despair. But above all, it's a movie about a donkey.
09/01/06
The film is perhaps the director's most perfectly realised, and certainly his most moving.
06/24/06
Bresson's greatest masterpiece.
11/09/05
A deft, impassioned, and wrenching film, but also — emphatically, absurdly — a film about a donkey. Indeed, it hardly pretends to be much more.
07/26/05
Each scene emerges as a minor miracle. Which makes the sum total an object of extraordinary glory.
06/24/05
The lens of dispassion Bresson invites us to look through during Balthazar embodies "a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it."
06/22/05
Bresson’s most poetic, haunting, personal work.
06/20/05
Robert Bresson's aesthetic of realist, material sounds and images assembled in paradoxical ways virtually defines the cinematic parable...
06/14/05
This is what makes Au Hasard Balthazar so powerful, and yet so distant. It asks as much of its audience as it does of its characters...
06/14/05
This is neither an easy film, nor, in the show biz sense, an entertaining one. It makes large demands upon its audience, and in return confers exceptional rewards.
05/09/05
Top CriticClick to read the article
04/17/04
Quietly devastating, nearly perfect allegory.
04/09/04
[In Au hasard Balthazar] the suffering is tempered...with the sense of small relief for the quiet little donkey that captured my heart.
04/01/04
The most modern equivalent of [Balthazar's] final scene may be the ending of Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves."
03/31/04
Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and Au Hasard Balthazar is his most heartbreaking prayer.
03/19/04
Top Critic...has the transcendent beauty of a Renaissance painting and the inspiring fire of a sermon.
03/19/04
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