98
Metascore
20 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineThis great film, made with uncompromising honesty and devastating reality, is, according to Jean-Luc Godard, "the world in an hour and a half."
- 100Village VoiceJ. HobermanVillage VoiceJ. HobermanTo cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heart-breaking and magnificent Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- the story of a donkey's life and death in rural France -- is the supreme masterpiece by one of the greatest of 20th-century filmmakers.
- 100Los Angeles TimesManohla DargisLos Angeles TimesManohla DargisIf in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling.
- 100Chicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonChicago TribuneMichael Wilmington1966 French masterpiece -- the finest, most deeply personal work of a filmmaker who has been compared, justifiably, to both Dostoyevsky and Bach.
- 100Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam ArnoldSeattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam ArnoldThe final scene of Balthazar's demise is one of cinema's most moving and haunting moments.
- 100Chicago ReaderDave KehrChicago ReaderDave KehrPerhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.
- 100Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertBresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does.
- 100Boston GlobeTy BurrBoston GlobeTy BurrTo see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't.
- 100The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyThe A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyIf one were looking for a perfectly realized film, Au Hasard Balthazar would be as likely a candidate as any. For every convention of film grammar and narrative that this 50-year-old masterpiece utilizes, it uses strictly on its own terms, discarding many more.
- 100Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAustin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenThis is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar, whose nasty, brutish life as a slave parallels that of a young farm girl.