Belle de Jour Reviews
Turner Classic Movies Online
Luis Bunuel's cheerfully brazen satire of sexual repression, social decorum, and erotic fantasies is in the running for Bunuel's kinkiest film, and that's saying a lot.
Scene-Stealers.com
Something that keeps us on our toes in Belle de Jour comes from Luis Buñuel's refusal to spell out what is real and what is not. Must this be so clear to us when the fantasy life of Séverine means so much to her?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Q Network Film Desk
A character study with surreal interludes and a rare film in which Buñuel depicts a member of the upper class with some sympathy and depth
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Top Critic
ColeSmithey.com
...is a fascinating cinematic achievement that dares to connect Deneuve's porcelain beauty to a world of bourgeois rebellion.
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
EmanuelLevy.Com
One of the most acclaimed and accessible masterworks of surrealist cinema, an erotic meditaton about reality and fantasy that remains alluring and shocking decades after it was made, at least partly due to Catherine Deneuve's cool, mesmerizing performance
Full Review
| Original Score: A
A delicacy, a passionate and compassionate study of erotica.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
It is possibly the best-known erotic film of modern times, perhaps the best.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Of all the supposedly challenging attractions playing locally in our supposedly more enlightened era, the most compellingly erotic and entertaining spectacle is still provided by Belle de Jour
This silly little masterpiece regards Deneuve as the goddess of light she really was -- a figment of our collective appetite for the unreal.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
A surprisingly discreet film considering the erotic nature of the subject matter.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Film Journal International
Icy sketch of prostitute's life by one of film's greatest directors
| Original Score: 5/5
Slant Magazine
A radical work that both looks back at the director's own early surrealist cinema and anticipates the work of David Lynch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
eFilmCritic.com
The use of dreams fused with reality works because the two things balance one another to create a whole, instead of detracting as a cop-out as most movies with this motif rely on.
| Original Score: 5/5
Every detail has been so carefully thought out that seeing it again is like seeing it in another key.
Austin Chronicle
One of master director Luis Buñuel's most wry and elegant films.
