Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

If you can see past the heavy-handed religious overtones you will encounter an inspired and deeply intelligent Bresson classic.

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.

The film does maintain a powerful mood throughout, a kind of stringency, and the fate of the humans fades into insignificance as the film draws to a bleak close.

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.

The film is perhaps the director's most perfectly realised, and certainly his most moving.

Bresson's greatest masterpiece.

A deft, impassioned, and wrenching film, but also — emphatically, absurdly — a film about a donkey. Indeed, it hardly pretends to be much more.

Each scene emerges as a minor miracle. Which makes the sum total an object of extraordinary glory.

The lens of dispassion Bresson invites us to look through during Balthazar embodies "a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it."