Belle Toujours Reviews

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Beautifully, economically, directed, acted and photographed (by Sabine Lancelin), 'Belle Toujours' is essentially an affectionate, witty, often farcical jeu d'esprit, sweetly and knowingly bringing together the old-fashioned and the modern.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/6

Belle Toujours lets us peer at one master embroidering on the legacy of another master.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

It's also more about class and less about sexual desire.

Full Review

Belle Toujours is doggedly inconsequential, deliberately non-eventful and blank.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Both performers make the most of skimpy roles, raising an eyebrow or focusing a gaze. But only those who've forgotten Buñuel's psychosexual daring will find such modest achievements nourishing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/6

The question lingers: Do we really need a sequel to Belle de Jour?

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

The 98-year-old [director] Oliveira addresses the beauty and cruelty of aging with such subtlety that the movie is worth taking on its own terms, as the hard-earned musings of its creator.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

This 70-minute exercise ends before it begins.

| Original Score: 2.5/5

Buñuel watchers will cluck with pleasure at that one; neophytes can revel in the steely elegance of [actor] Piccoli, who at 80 (when this film was made) effervesces with the joy of his craft. Belle Toujours glistens with discreet charms.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Falls too often into didactic post-game analysis for its delicate mysteries to retain their luster.

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Oliveira is a man of astounding finesse. The movie accumulates the sort of meaning that lifts it far beyond the realm of a director's conceit.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

It's a tremendously economical film, with not a shot or a second wasted, yet rich with ambiguity, comedy, longing and sadness.

Full Review

[This] sequel to the classic Belle de Jour well demonstrates de Oliveira's undiminished cinematic style and humor, including several surrealistic touches and nods to various elements of Bunuel's classic.

Another sublimely weird one from unstoppable Portuguese nonagenarian Manoel de Oliveira, a man who will outlive us all.

| Original Score: 4/4

Oliveira's short but sweet rumination on growing old and the fading of sexual desire is not only high-concept, but one of his most watchable.

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