Popular reviews

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe 7

  Too dumb to get what’s happening here but it “felt” funny!

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  Review by kársten ★★★★ 10

  this is, and i don't say this lightly, bananas

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★★ 4

  97/100

  When I first heard the title, I thought, "Finally! Someone's going to tell the truth about the bourgeoisie!" What a disappointment. It would be hard to imagine a less fair or, or accurate portrait.

  Hard to quantify the cumulative satirical force this movie brings to bear, as it maintains the same level of genial drollery from start to finish. I always start out mildly amused, wind up gobsmacked...but it seems entirely possible that shuffling the scenes at random would have much the same effect. It's just a single pointed joke that gets funnier and funnier, abetted by a sextet of actors who refrain from any winking or nudging—Bulle Ogier in particular achieves maximum vacuity without calling attention to herself…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 1

  90/100

  A winding, inescapable nightmare separated by emptiness. If this wasn't so harshly hilarious it would be impossible to take in, mainly because entitlement doesn't seem like a topic to showcase without a certain measure of levity. Its structure, beginning like an awkward play of misunderstandings, soon dissolves into a satirical depiction of grating realities, utilizing the energy of chaos as a contrast between the consistently still and contained imagery. Even the most surrealistic incident within this dreamlike series of events carries an unflinching eye, viewing all the strange and despicable behavior like a curious animal; wide-eyed and casually attentive.

  Don't you hate it when restaurants run out of water?

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★½ 11

  What can I say; I think I’ve found a new favourite director after a single film.

  Buñuel has the same high regard for both his characters and audience alike. Like a cat with a mouse, he toys with them; tosses them up in the air, bats them about a while, then sits back and watches them wobble and stumble about; all the time his tail gingerly flicking. Just when you think you have your bearings; and escape into a lush field of meaning is within grasp; he pounces again.

  I’ve read that Buñuel was an accomplished hypnotist in his youth, and that he believed that the movies were a form of hypnotism. I believe it; I’m still in a trance.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 4

  Catching Up with Buñuel

  At some point in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (any sense of time, whether diegetic or otherwise, quickly becomes meaningless as scene after scene ends with a character waking up and reflecting, "What a strange dream I've just had…"), the main characters go to a dinner party at a colonel's house where they're served fake plastic chicken, and then a large curtain is pulled back to reveal a theater audience. The dinner guests bashfully mumble something about having forgotten their lines and hastily scurry off stage.

  This is Buñuel's metaphor for the aristocracy, the titular discreet charm of the bourgeoisie—so discreet, in fact, that you might not be able to see it at all. Class…

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  Review by nora ★★★★

  buñuel could have said "eat the rich" but instead he said "the rich don't eat" because he's a cryptic bitch

  (6/10 from 1972)

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  Review by Gabriel Gundacker 1

  I really thought “French Airplane” (my takeaway) was the wrong takeaway. But then I looked up every other review/critique/essay (Ebert, Sciretta etc.) and found they had all written the exact same: French Airplane!

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★

  Kept waiting for that lady to have her eye sliced open but I guess that's a different movie

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  Review by Lise ★★★★ 9

  Holy bejeezus, what an odd film. I mean truly odd. Not in the Lynch way, though, but in some completely new way. Sometimes it plays out like a Monty Python skit. Sometimes it feels like French New Wave. Sometimes it feels like a laugh track is missing. Sometimes it comes this close to slapstick but without the pay-off. It is definitely satire, though, that much I can say with confidence. The film pokes fun at so many things it could be (and probably has been) the subject of many a PhD dissertation.

  I honestly can't write a review of it, at least not without spending way too much time I don't have right now reading about it.

  All I can say is it is truly odd, and compelling and engaging and I loved it. I really loved it.

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  Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★

  It's a series of largely plotless vignettes about five content upper class French drug dealers (and one crooked South American diplomat) trying to have dinner together while constantly being interrupted by complications of escalating weirdness. It's genuinely funny, the satire of upper class mores cutting. The characters don't really stand out as individuals, but that's the point: their monumental complacency has melted their personalities into oblivion. The only way they can continue to live comfortably while surrounded by such madness and cruelty is to keep their concerns and conversations as banal as possible. You can't live that way for long without it sandblasting the features right off of your personality. Bunuel directs with a mixture of elegant tracking shots and…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★ 18

  My frustration with Buñuel's films is inherent with my frustration at a certain subset of film, that of the variety which prominently features vapid rich white bourgeois doing vapid rich white bourgeois nonsense. Not my thing, and unfortunately seems to be a mainstay among many directors' bodies of work.

  So The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a film I kind of despise on many levels if nothing else than because it's literally lampooning the very thing I hate, the satire good but still forcing me to endure what it's satirizing. Essentially a group of friends go from place to place expecting to eat dinner at each location only for circumstances to subvert their meal. Such inconveniences reveal to the…