Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Roberto_ ★★★ 7

  this shrek live action spin-off about donkey was darker than expected.....

• 

  Review by Simon ★★★★★ 19

  Jean-Luc Godard said that Au Hasard Balthazar summed up the world.
  So what sums up the world?

  Life, death, happiness, sorrow, luck, injustice, beauty, silence, lonliness, violence, evil, abuse, awful people, good people.

  The thing is that I was thinking of themes from Au Hasard Balthazar and they all fit to describe the world, and how it works. And those are main elements in this film, not just something that comes up once in a while.

  Robert Bresson presents the story from the perspective of a donkey. Pretty much the whole film is painful to get through. Not only because of Balthazar’s treatment (I’ll get to that later), but because the evil is shown superior. Balthazar is not capable of…

• 

  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 16

  ***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

  Before the French New Wave could be formally established, a director named Robert Bresson suddenly appears for the sake of French cinema and starts to consolidate his overwhelmingly unusual direction style, a style that would earn him worldwide recognition and a strong Catholic sensation throughout his filmography that first began in 1951 with his film Journal d'un Curé de Campagne (1951) and that would be utterly strengthened with a possibly intentional human condition trilogy consisting of his three most powerful masterpieces: Pickpocket (1959), Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette (1967). Au Hasard Balthazar is arguably his definite and most representative cinematic masterwork and his most emotionally compelling piece of work. Representing…

• 

  Review by Lara Pop ★★★ 38

  Nope. Me and Bresson didn't click the second time around either. And I know exactly why, which makes it a hundred times more infuriating. I'll try my best not to write in a cynical manner because Jack, I can see why this resonated with you.

  Bresson paints a parable of perseverance and strength of spirit with his simple story of Balthazar, a donkey who goes from owner to owner and has no choice but to endure their treatment. The people are mostly cruel towards him and beat him to no end, but he keeps on going. The film is uniquely shown from Balthazar's perspective. The backstories of each owner are left deliberately hazy because Balthazar himself is incapable of understanding…

• 

  Review by Chris ★★½ 6

  I can completely understand why this movie is lauded but it is not for me.

  Here's some thoughts I had while watching this film:

  - Wow, donkeys are real furry when they are young.

  - So is that the sick girl? Is she dead? Wouldn't they be more upset if she was dead?

  - So everyone's grown up now and there's the whip. And there's the donkey.

  - Oh, they're hitting the donkey. I wonder how they filmed that.

  - Looks like they're actually hitting that donkey, or VERY CONVINCINGLY pretending to.

  - Oh now the asshole thief is trying to get Balthazar to move. Good job being stubborn donkey. Oh wait, now he's hitting the donkey. I wonder if…

• 

  Review by dylan gelula ★★★★★

  it used to really offend me that in bressons book he was like actors have to just sit there and have no idea whats happening and then you film them. the second they get ideas you have to find new ones. but with each passing year i am softening into the position that he is right

• 

  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★

  An incredibly sad film about the suffering and pain a girl and her donkey must endure at the hands of man!

  It was extremely difficult to watch! The extent of cruelty man is capable of inflicting on other living beings and creatures is absolutely heartbreaking!

• 

  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

  There are times when you don't want a "pick-me-up." There are times when you want art that conveys the sadness, cruelty, and just-plain hardship of life. Not "misery porn," but art that shows life the way it is, without sentimentality or melodrama. These are the times for Au Hasard Balthazar.

  This definitely "hits different" now that I'm a dog owner. Balthasar is such a good boy, just like my Hugo.

• 

  Review by spap1 ★★★½ 9

  Au Hasard Balthazar, or what should be known as Fuck Humans the Movie, starring Balthazar as Jesus…

  i knew i’d like this but wow… i think, after seeing Pickpocket, i didn’t know what to expect from my next Bresson film, as i didn’t enjoy that one too much, but this just blew all of my ideas of him out of the water. the places it has lost stars in is only it’s complete relentless, which, at times, really did grate me down to the very core. 

  there’s so many thoughts circling around my mind right now, so if this is a mess, please excuse it. and i’m going to write as though Balthazar were a human, because animals and humans…

• 

  Review by Tony (tectactoe) ★★½ 3

  [48]

  Oof. Second viewing, first was in 2008 wherein I retained very little. Not that I’m fundamentally opposed to inexorable misery machines (see e.g. THE TURIN HORSE or SÁTÁNTANGÓ), but Bresson’s trademarks work against him here, twofold: [1] His abbreviated sylphlike style generates too much turbulence from something that should be decisively fluent. This construction befits things like A MAN ESCAPED or PICKPOCKET, but they are films that both tinker with a graspable, larger concept—escaping prison and living as a thief, respectively—that’s easily rendered from piecemeal scenes and ideas; everything flows upward in service of the Big Picture. This method makes numerous transitions and throughlines in AU HASARD BALTHAZAR both strange and awkward, as if frames from the storyboard went…

• 

  Review by James 🇺🇦 ★★★★★

  A deeply spiritual yet thoroughly restrained parable from French autuer Robert Bresson that is an obvious allegory for the Christian faith.

  Balthazar is shown as nothing more or less than a donkey, which Bresson makes clear by not even slightly anthropomorphising him. We cannot know his emotions, thoughts or feelings because he is just a simple creature. He experiences pain, cruelty and kindness, as we all do in life and his complete lack of power over the events that surround his life and ability only to observe is perhaps a suggestion that we the audience are all like Balthazar in that life has plans for us that are totally out of our control.

  Bresson's complete refusal to allow emotion to…

• 

  Review by Andra 🦋 ★★★★★ 24

  Born in pain, lived in pain, died in pain. All because of humans. All because of the world. He knew nothing, but pain. Cruelty. Derision. It's all so incomprehensible, yet tragically tangible. He bears the consequences of others' faults. Innocent witness of the brutality of life.

  Au Hasard Balthazar follows the life of a donkey and his various owners. He witnesses every kind of brutality, his big, innocent eyes wide open in front of it, yet he does not judge, he simply bears the pain. Balthazar is a vessel of sufferance, a silent witness of failure. He is the most innocent, the only innocent, creature in the movie and, because of that, his destiny is already signed: no innocent can…