In Praise Of Love (Éloge de l'amour) Reviews

All the beauty does not make the film even half as profound as it so obviously strives to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Love, in Godard's case, is indistinguishable from cinema and thus he sees the growing capitalist machine as a threat to both.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Free-associative, unreasonable and stubborn, unresolved, and elegiac in tone, In Praise of Love is a great meditation on memory, aging, and love.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

What keeps me coming back to a filmmaker I never warmed up to, is that I find the rascal irresistible.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Ultimately, though, In Praise of Love is about themes, about the anti-Hollywood sentiment that Godard feels so passionately about, and this is where the film begins to crumble.

Full Review | Original Score: 53/100

Godard has created such a hermetic, uncompromising world that only the hardiest cinematic spelunkers are likely to appreciate its depths.

Full Review

It's the intellectual ride of your life, as far as moviegoing goes.

A haunting, intense work, intellectually exploratory yet too emotionally acute in its melancholy to be considered merely academic.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

The movie's ripe, enrapturing beauty will tempt those willing to probe its inscrutable mysteries.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

It's intriguing, visually arresting and utterly impenetrable!

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

When a character comments 'too many changes are in the air that lack a means of expression,' one senses that Godard, at 72, is still struggling to communicate those changes through the medium of film.

| Original Score: 3.5/4

An unsuccessful attempt at a movie of ideas.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

The 70-year-old Godard has become, to judge from In Praise of Love, the sort of bitter old crank who sits behind his light meter and harangues the supposed injustices of the artistic world-at-large without doing all that much to correct them.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5

Gone are the days of an exciting existentialist movie mastermind who once knew how to stroke the consciousness of the enthusiastically challenged, adventurous moviegoer.

Full Review | Original Score: D-

Gives the impression of a man who has lost his will to make movies, and even to go on living, a sentiment difficult to empathize with without likewise giving up on life.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

Godard's utterly nonlinear drama explores history and memory, old age and youth, love and art, action and reaction, life and existence, and possibly even more ideas than I was unable to mine in one exhaustive viewing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

The best indication of the film's pretentiousness comes from recurrent images of a book with blank pages, as if to point out that Godard has nothing to say, but so what? Let's throw in a few images and people will come anyway.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

A ponderous meditation on love that feels significantly longer than its relatively scant 97 minutes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Like most of Godard's films, In Praise of Love makes you stay awake and lean forward.

Full Review

Even when he's not at his most critically insightful, Godard can still be smarter than any 50 other filmmakers still at work.

Full Review