Popular reviews

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  Review by Eddie White ★★★★★ 3

  A remarkable and relatively hidden film by French master Clouzot, La Vérité is a stack of lethal dominoes; love, lust, jealousy and infidelity, that begin to fall from its beginning and never cease with each highly charged scene that follows. Bardot as Dominique, brandishes her sensuality like a sharpened dagger, transforming from pouting, petulent temptress to an enraged and heartbroken soul in a performance that shows what she was capable of as an actor. The film has an incredible rhythm to it, an operatic feel that ties in with the conducting talents of Dominique's lover, Gilbert. Throughout the film I was struck by its anxiousness, through its direction, editing and performances and couldn't help but think of it as a rapidly beating heart, ready to explode. In an uncanny parallel to this noticeable vibe, I then read that Clouzot's wife in real life, died of a heart attack shortly after its release and his life and career never recovered.

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  Review by WraithApe ★★★

  Like Rashomon before it, H.G. Clouzot's La Vérité puts subjectivity under the microscope in a tightly controlled courtroom drama that explores the slippery nature of truth. Dominique (Brigitte Bardot) is standing trial for the murder of her former lover, Gilbert, and the judicial process is used as a framing device to relay her story through flashbacks as we, along with the jury, are invited to divine the truth from the hearsay. It's probably down to my own bias against courtroom drama, the artistic potential of which I find inevitably limited by its already dramaturgical nature and the fact that lawyers are essentially actors, but here, it felt particularly intrusive. The flashback sequences, recollections of events leading up to the fatal…

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  Review by Graham ★★★★½

  "You love being touched."
  - Gilbert Tellier

  Clearly. And why not?

  OK, so let's get this out of the way up front. Brigitte Bardot was absolutely stunning in her heyday, and it's easy to see why she was a huge box office draw. She really is an astonishing on-screen presence. More recently her vitriolic ugly side has been exposed, and while I'll not go into that here, it's clear she has some strong ideals that are not aligned with my own.

  Right then, back to the movie.

  How to describe this... I'll go with "Witness for the Prosecution, au Francaise". This is like a creamy, dreamy revelation of a movie for me that just screams 60s France. New Wave, yeah...…

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  Review by Grant McLanaghan ★★★★★

  A young woman is charged with the murder of an up-and-coming orchestra conductor. At her trial, we learn about her younger life and her relationship with her parents and, particularly, her sister. She’s painted as being shallow, lazy, sulky, lacking in virtues and intensely jealous of her sibling.

  Whenever an especially pertinent part of the case is touched upon by the prosecuting counsel, we’re shown it via flashback. Such scenes, I believe, we can take to be the objective truth and they serve as a counterpoint to the rhetoric of the court, embodying the shades of grey that are typically omitted in legal contests.

  The film takes an (appropriately) honest look at people in their late teens/early 20s; their lives,…

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  Review by ruth ★★★★½

  "To judge love, you must be capable of love."

  Simply one of the best courtroom dramas. Somehow reminds me of Witness for the Prosecution, but La Verite is more serious and bitter. Not only depicted the trial room atmosphere successfully, but La Verite also explores the dark lethal side of suicide and love. We learn about Bardot's character and her past life in the courtroom. Here, she's depicted as lazy, narrow-minded, moody, lack in morals and virtue. Every immoral character, you name it. The positive side about her is she's an out-going person, maybe too much that she'd say yes to every date offer.

  Brigitte Bardot was accused of premeditated murder. The focus of the trial is not whether she…

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  Review by santiago ★★★★½

  This is one of the best dramas ive seen, another proof that France is the home of cinema.

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  Review by Stephen M ★★★½ 2

  I know this is acclaimed but I found this courtroom drama by Clouzot to be a little heavy-handed. The central conceit, a justice system that is uniformly condemning of a woman on trial for murder for her sexually-free lifestyle is not always believable, at least in how its portrayed. It’s clear Clouzot sees this as a metaphor for the hypocritical bourgeoisie’s stance against and fear of young people and especially women who were adopting a devil-may-care rebellious Left Bank culture. It’s just so unrealistic as to what would happen in a courtroom that it detracted from the impact of the theme.

  I much preferred the flashbacks that told the story of the woman on trial, Dominique (Brigitte Bardot in a…

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  Review by Mark Costello ★★★★½

  A blistering courtroom drama from Henri-Georges Cluzot (Wages of Fear, Les Diaboliques) and starring a never better Brigitte Bardot, this slow burn tells in flashback not how a promising young composer was murdered - Bardot admits to it in the very first few shots - but why.

  For a very simple and linear narrative structure, the film manages to really get under the skin of our protagonists - Bardot is a bohemian who wants to do nothing and be nothing, all the while railing against modern (for the times) societal norms and structures. Packing the courtroom with aging white man allows the film to place Bardot as a cypher for every single generational issue that had arisen at that time…

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  Review by noir1946 ★★★

  “You judge me, but you’ve never lived or loved.”

  Coming at the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague, Clouzot’s La Verite seems a bit stodgy in comparison to what his younger colleagues were up to, but the courtroom drama has enough going for it to make it a notable achievement for the director’s later period.

  The center of the film is, of course, Bardot’s Dominique and her efforts to reject the conventional lives of her family. Striving to find meaning in bohemian Paris, she steals Gilbert (Sami Frey), the boyfriend of her sister, Annie (Marie-Jose Nat), only for an extremely tempestuous love affair to develop, leading to Gilbert’s murder. The film alternates between flashbacks to the events leading up to Gilbert’s…

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  Review by Jim Morrow ★★★★

  Clouzot doesn't allow us any easy path to support Dominique (Bardot) or her initially vacuous and self-indulgent lifestyle. She is petulant, selfish, empty-headed, and resentful in the way many of us can be when we are full of youthful, unfocused dreams. Her entire existence is a disregard and scorn of any traditional values. I've been in that neighborhood and it's often motivated by fear that accepting any traditional guidance will rob your soul and turn you into a boring drudge. Mix that with a general indolence and casual approach to sex and we have a classic setup of youth vs respectable society. The staid and stuffy court, judges, lawyers, and spectators, brimming with moral rectitude view her as some sort…

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  Review by Steve G 🇵🇸 🇾🇪 ★★

  I'm always wary of any French film made around this time just in case it's one of those French New Wave things, but I figured I would be in good hands with Henri-Georges Clouzot, mainly because of The Wages of Fear reasons.

  But The Truth really isn't 'the greatest unknown courtroom drama' that Mubi claimed it was. It's actually very, very dull indeed and I found the courtroom scenes to be confusing, actually. I suspect this has little to do with Clouzot and perhaps more to do with the French legal system, certainly from around that time. Maybe one of Letterboxd's many French legal experts could confirm or deny this.

  The direct involvement of the judge in this hearing, basically…

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  Review by Neo ★★★★★ 8

  j’sais pas si je préfère au Salaire de la peur mais c’était incroyable, j’adore ça claque. 
  Les femmes vraiment des salopes toujours la même tu connais ça bouge pas.
  J’ai envie d’écrire une big critique mais je suis nul donc nan