L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) Reviews
Slant Magazine
The poster child of cinematic modernism, one of those early-'60s event films that seemed to break every rule classical Hollywood ever codified.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Observer [UK]
I've always found it romantic and sexy, full of yearning and mystery.
This is London
Was there ever a film thought so boring by so many yet accorded the status of a classic?
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Guardian [UK]
Profoundly mysterious and disturbing, a para-surrealist masterpiece whose nightmarish scenario appears to have been absorbed from Buñuel and Antonioni and transmitted onward to Greenaway.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Little White Lies
an enigmatic mind-melt that sends characters and viewers alike on a chronology-confounding loop down labyrinthine corridors and up garden paths in pursuit of a (re)solution that, even after it has been found, remains elusive and ambiguous.
Radio Times
A veritable masterpiece, but beware, this icon of French New Wave cinema is as likely to irritate as it is to mesmerise.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Total Film
A sublime meditation on memory, perception and fantasy - or art-house pretension at its emptiest? The jury's still out...
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Movie Metropolis
Its one of the greatest films ever made, and an experience unrivaled in cinema.
Full Review
| Original Score: 10/10
Q Network Film Desk
the elegant tracking shots amid the baroque architectural excesses that frame the film's lingering questions draw you into a world of mystery that seems to be ultimately understandable, yet constantly unravels at every turn
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Turner Classic Movies Online
... a tantalizing mystery and a work of cinema as intricately faceted as a jewel.
Groucho Reviews
Gorgeous and elliptical...also became [for some] an instant subject of derision as a prototype for the impenetrable European art film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Slant Magazine
The recurring attitude throughout most interpretations of Marienbad is that of sheer interpretation fatigue.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Filmcritic.com
inexplicable and lovely; a fever dream without symptoms, an asylum run by the inmates.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Love it or hate it, no one's cinematic education is complete without having taken this baffling, haunting, uniquely challenging movie ride.
Top CriticTo even talk of a story is nonsensical, since a central aesthetic of the film involves the effects of fantasy, time and subjective memory on human consciousness. Marienbad takes place in a heightened, sci-fi nightmare world where knowing, believing
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Oregonian
A daring experiment that succeeds not only in shattering familiar forms but in providing an apt shape for its unique story.
Combustible Celluloid
What finally dazzled me about the film is the way that Resnais cleverly put together a 94-minute film without ever taking a stand on any single thing; every single shot, detail, story, and character is suspect -- and subject to change without notice.
Marienbad is elegantly hermetic, a ravishing waxworks that has stillness at its heart.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Los Angeles CityBeat
Marienbad's fluid reality is almost like cyberpunk before there was cyberpunk.
