Both Sides of the Blade
IFC Films | Release Date: July 8, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
73
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 27 Critic Reviews
Positive:
21
Mixed:
5
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreJul 11, 2022
There is something exquisitely grown-up about Both Sides of the Blade, which works its way up into a series of excruciating fights between Jean and Sara in which they talk and talk and wound one another terribly while failing to ever say what they really mean. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyJul 8, 2022
Both Sides of the Blade is a romance, a love triangle, a marriage drama, an infidelity narrative, all familiar ground, but Denis' approach is her own. Read full review
90
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsSep 9, 2022
There was never a question of whether this would be a great movie, but the pleasant surprise is that it is, in fact, a very great one. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiJul 14, 2022
Human beings can be really complicated. And thankfully, there are filmmakers around like Claire Denis who make films such as Both Sides of the Blade to remind us of that complexity. Films that seemingly help us in trying to understand each other, but really show us that we might never be able to. Read full review
88
Slant MagazinePat BrownFeb 21, 2022
The studied ambiguity of what’s going on in Fire doesn’t keep it from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller. Read full review
83
Paste MagazineNatalia KeoganMar 7, 2022
Though it pales in comparison to the bold creativity of High Life, Fire is adroitly handled in Denis’ hands. A melodrama steeped in typically French ideas of sexual deception and personal passion, it still manages to find a freshness thoroughly conveyed by Binoche and Lindon’s involvement. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichFeb 15, 2022
As is often the case with Denis’ films, Fire grows more illuminating as it gets hotter; what starts like a constrained and unusually jagged French drama is eventually forged into an incendiary portrait of three people who — to varying degrees — all delude themselves into thinking that the past is possible to quarantine away from the present. Read full review
80
EmpireDavid ParkinsonNov 7, 2022
Despite the almost caricatural Frenchness of the premise, this is a superbly acted and intricately directed drama that makes a virtue of its very human feelings and follies. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekJul 11, 2022
In Both Sides of the Blade, Sara isn’t acting like a man; she’s simply being herself, and the raw texture of her desire, and how it affects her behavior, isn’t something we can either applaud or disapprove of. It’s just there, in all its cruel, ragged splendor. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJul 7, 2022
Watching it, you can feel Denis zeroing in on the conventions of the bourgeois French melodrama with something resembling a lover’s playfulness; she wants to rough them up, test their limits and bend them into challenging new configurations. Read full review
80
The New YorkerRichard BrodyMar 4, 2022
The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyFeb 15, 2022
The sense of love dissolving and lives thrown into chaos as a dormant past violently breaks through the surface is unexpectedly moving, all the more so because of the film’s rigorous rejection of sentimentality. Read full review
80
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyFeb 15, 2022
Some viewers may find it hard to credit the emotional extremes on display here, which seem more to do with the codes of French psychological drama than with the way people might actually behave in real relationships. Indeed, Binoche has not always convinced in conventional terms when playing women in a psychosexual fluster. Nevertheless, it’s something that she specialises in, and she pushes that register a lot further here – and far more compellingly - than in Denis’s Sunshine. Read full review
80
VarietyGuy LodgeFeb 15, 2022
Denis’ latest sees her applying her usual rigorous form and psychological curiosity to material that tends to inspire more generic directorial treatment, teasing out a rich, nuanced exploration of female desire from the fault lines of an ostensibly simple narrative. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJul 5, 2022
Both Sides of the Blade is what people like about French cinema. Its indulgences are worth wading through because, in its commitment to the truth about people and its willingness to explore the hugeness of normal human life, it’s unlike anything you’ll find in America. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreJun 29, 2022
This Juliette Binoche drama has heat and hurt and a whiff of intrigue as Denis (“High Life,” “Beau Travail”) peels away layers of background that reveals more and more of the true nature of her characters. Read full review
75
The Film StageRory O'ConnorFeb 15, 2022
It isn’t difficult to imagine Denis–one of the most cerebral, confounding filmmakers we have–constructing Fire, with its oddly trivial love triangle and omnipresent string section, as a duplicitous farce; a way to upend our expectations of how a film like this should look. Read full review
67
ColliderChase HutchinsonJul 8, 2022
While it is important for the film to immerse itself in the emotional struggles of the scenes, it also is hindered by some occasionally abrupt edits and anarchic writing that dulls the sharpness of its story. Read full review
67
The PlaylistJessica KiangFeb 15, 2022
Marie never seems particularly interested in either man except for how they are interested in her and is revealed to be so self-centered in her pursuit of amours both fou and entirely rational, that she is far less likable than Binoche’s disingenuously bright-eyed and forthright performance can account for. Read full review
65
TheWrapElizabeth WeitzmanJul 8, 2022
A slow burn that never quite bursts into flame, Both Sides of the Blade is likely to appeal most to those who are already fans of director Claire Denis. That said, would anyone turn down the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with her luminous leading lady, Juliette Binoche? Read full review
63
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyJul 14, 2022
The unhurried pace Denis maintains insures that the subplots feel less like distractions than a nod to the contradictoriness of daily life. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Nick JamesSep 10, 2022
Denis’s usual panache with mood and imagery doesn’t mitigate that awkwardness, nor does it alter the feeling that, although both leads individually portray impassioned suffering brilliantly, there’s little chemistry between them. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeyFeb 15, 2022
The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 15, 2022
Claire Denis’s new film is a seductively indirect love triangle, a drama of the mind as much as the heart. It’s intriguing if contrived and anticlimactic, though acted at the highest pitch of sensual conviction. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJul 7, 2022
How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubJordan HoffmanJul 5, 2022
This movie is not particularly good. One seizes upon highlights from the sideline when what’s happening front and center is just so dull. Read full review
37
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanJul 13, 2022
The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne. Read full review
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