Au hasard Balthazar
Cinema Ventures | Release Date: September 16, 1966 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
98
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 20 Critic Reviews
Positive:
19
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy Vishnevetsky
If one were looking for a perfectly realized film, Au Hasard Balthazar would be as likely a candidate as any. For every convention of film grammar and narrative that this 50-year-old masterpiece utilizes, it uses strictly on its own terms, discarding many more. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
This is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar, whose nasty, brutish life as a slave parallels that of a young farm girl. Read full review
100
Slant MagazineEric Henderson
Au Hasard Balthazar possesses a strictly balanced, bemused-unto-neigh-indifferent attitude toward delineating between the wry and the glum, the sacred and the profane. Read full review
100
CineVuePatrick Gamble
Truly one of the most emotionally devastating films to have ever graced the big screen, Au Hasard Balthazar is an exemplary example of Bresson’s art that transcends its symbolic reverie to Christianity to become an eloquent prayer for the potential power of cinema to truly move us. Read full review
100
EmpireDavid Parkinson
If you can see past the heavy-handed religious overtones you will encounter an inspired and deeply intelligent Bresson classic. Read full review
100
LarsenOnFilmJosh Larsen
Au Hasard Balthazar has the transcendent beauty of a Renaissance painting and the inspiring fire of a sermon. It’s one of those rare movies that could change your life, by making you rethink how you live it. Read full review
100
St. Louis Post-DispatchHarper Barnes
Simultaneously enigmatic and painfully direct, melodramatic yet subtle, playful yet tragic, Au Hasard Balthazar is a deeply moving portrait of the sins and mercies of mankind as seen and suffered by an ass. [30 Jul 2004, p.E03]
100
TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not credited)
This great film, made with uncompromising honesty and devastating reality, is, according to Jean-Luc Godard, "the world in an hour and a half." Read full review
100
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
To cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heart-breaking and magnificent Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- the story of a donkey's life and death in rural France -- is the supreme masterpiece by one of the greatest of 20th-century filmmakers. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesManohla Dargis
If in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael Wilmington
1966 French masterpiece -- the finest, most deeply personal work of a filmmaker who has been compared, justifiably, to both Dostoyevsky and Bach. Read full review
100
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
The final scene of Balthazar's demise is one of cinema's most moving and haunting moments. Read full review
100
Chicago ReaderDave Kehr
Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy Burr
To see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't. Read full review
91
IndieWireStaff (Not Credited)
Through Bresson's unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this simple story becomes a moving parable about purity and transcendence. [16 Feb 2018]
90
The New York TimesRoger Greenspun
This is neither an easy film, nor, in the show biz sense, an entertaining one. It makes large demands upon its audience, and in return confers exceptional rewards. Read full review
90
The New YorkerAnthony Lane
The film could have sunk beneath this symbolic burden, yet it is lightened by the speed and precision of Bresson’s art; he could derive more from one pair of hands than most directors can from two hours of blood and guts. Read full review
90
Time OutGeoff Andrew
Imbued with a dry, ironic sense of humour, the film is perhaps the director's most perfectly realised, and certainly his most moving. Read full review
60
The New YorkerPauline Kael
It's a meditation on sin and saintliness. Considered a masterpiece by some, but others may find it painstakingly tedious and offensively holy.
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