Le Mépris (Contempt) Reviews

Who is the Godard guy and how could he make something as humdrum yet full-of-itself as Contempt?

Full Review | Original Score: 62/100

Godard's self-reflexive meditation about love, marriage, and filmmaking is a masterpiece, which among other things, proves that sex symbol Brigitte Bardot could act.

Full Review | Original Score: A

What's the price of selling out? Contempt asks the question of its characters, its audience, and its own director.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Godard has finally dared to get serious, achieving not mock pathos but a perfect tragedy.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/6

It's talky and filled with broken rhythms and a running stream of thoughts, and is boldly told in exaggerated stylized terms.

Full Review | Original Score: A

An expensive international production, but still one of Godard's most personal and most perverse films.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Godard sets interesting scenes, with provocative color combinations and a suggestive pictorial flow. But out of it all comes nothing -- or very little that tells you why this wife is so contemptuous of her husband. Maybe he should be contemptuous of her!

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Screw Adaptation and its lack of temerity. Contempt is a meta-movie that places the onus back on the viewer. How are we to sensibly respond, and is there any sense in that at all?

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

While Contempt is seen by many as Godard's most "commercial" or "mainstream" film, it is also one of his most emotionally stirring and deeply felt.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

A superlative film about many things, including the making of a film, the break-up of a married couple, and the parallels between the contemporary New Wave world (of 1963) and the classical (Old Wave) world of Homer.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

A powerful, uncomfortable and essential work.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

It is not just the uniqueness of the narrative structure or the boldly original story that make Contempt such a fantastic film, but also Godard's typically original and mind-bogglingly beautiful imagery that make the it one of a kind.

Full Review | Original Score: 93/100

The star pouts prettily, as always; Palance is fascinatingly evil; and famed director Fritz Lang plays himself with aplomb.

Full Review

One of my favorite Godard films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

A fine film about the pressures of filmmaking. And it's an even finer film about the tragedy of marital dissolution.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

It emerges as one of Godard's most emotional films.

Full Review

Contempt was Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 attempt at a big-budget, big- star production, and more or less satisfied his curiosity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

A profoundly sad yet beautiful fable about the cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Godard has a great sense for the visual, and his films are feasts for the eyes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

It's not Godard's best film, but it is one of cinema's most interesting looks at itself, masquerading as a love story gone awry.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5