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05/30/08
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
100 %
Reviews Counted: 23 Fresh: 23 Rotten:0 Average Rating: 9.4/10
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hr 35 mins
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 director Robert Bresson's films. Like his masterpiece DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST, Bresson's AU HASARD... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Anne Wiazemsky, Philippe Asselin
Director: Robert Bresson
Reviews
Top Critic
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
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11/15/07
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
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06/24/06
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
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 Critic
[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
It is a devastating picture, scored to a Schubert piano sonata and done with a purity and austerity that transfixes us.
03/18/04
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