The Image Book
Kino Lorber | Release Date: January 25, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
76
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 22 Critic Reviews
Positive:
19
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)David DavidsonJan 24, 2019
The Image Book is worth seeing if only as an aesthetic experience – to let its images and sounds wash over you – while also offering itself up as an object to reflect on. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJan 24, 2019
I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure. It is a work of ecstatic despair, an argument for the futility of human effort that almost refutes itself through the application of a grumpy and tenacious artistic will. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrMar 1, 2019
Like much of Godard’s recent work, The Image Book is a rumination on art, politics, history, and mankind’s eternal folly disguised as a cinematic collage. It’s plotless but it has shape; random but with purpose. After initially fighting the movie, one might find oneself giving into its flow, the visuals scudding across one’s retina, the assemblage of quotes and mournful pensees on the soundtrack seducing one into following along in its wake. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsFeb 8, 2019
If The Image Book is just a great whatsit, like the thing everyone’s trying to find in the Mike Hammer picture, why is it bracing and finally very moving? Read full review
83
Original-CinLiam LaceyJan 28, 2019
Coherence was hard to establish but the memory prompts, the lurid colourization and off-beat editing held the attention. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubJosh CabritaJan 24, 2019
If Godard weren’t Godard, would we be so inclined to accept this faux history lesson as truth? Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangFeb 13, 2019
The Image Book is an 85-minute cinematic brainstorm, a swirling, dazzling, maddening frenzy of disconnected sights and sounds that have been compiled and arranged according to a rhythmic and rhetorical logic that only its maker can fully divine. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJan 31, 2019
If this turns out to be his final statement (he’s 87), it’s an appropriately ragged one, half-formed but gesturing toward meaning. Every edge bleeds. Read full review
80
Time OutDave CalhounMay 24, 2018
One of the many powerful things about The Image Book is how it so aggressively rejects any sort of gloss or neat packaging. The telling is the story. Read full review
80
TheWrapSteve PondMay 18, 2018
Make no mistake: This is an angry movie, both in form and in content. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 18, 2018
If it’s hard to understand exactly what Godard is trying to say in this brief scrapbook scamper—it clocks in at one hour, 25 minutes—just watching it is a strange, melancholy pleasure, and an open window into the world of things that worry its creator. Read full review
80
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 18, 2018
Our world, in The Image Book, has finally caught up to Jean-Luc Godard’s doom-laden dream of it. He seems to be saying that we all have a choice: to change it, or to sit back in our TV armchairs and watch. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 18, 2018
It is bewildering. I’m not sure I understood more than a fraction and of course it can be dismissed as obscurantism and mannerism. But I found The Image Book rich, disturbing and strange. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerMar 6, 2019
True, few of the cutup crew ever had the depth of knowledge or stylistic panache that Godard – one of the last remaining masters of the 20th century's most vibrant art forms – brings to the screen. But then, is The Image Book really a film? Godard himself has re-engineered it as an art installation, to be shown on a TV with speakers surrounding it, and that would probably be a better home. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzJan 25, 2019
Caveats aside, this is, in my estimation, a typically stimulating but opaque and deliberately frustrating late-period Godard film, good but not great, distinguished primarily by the fact that it's the first Godard film to use no actors at all. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineSam C. MacJan 20, 2019
It’s through exercising a certain kind of madness that the film connects even at its most disjointed. Read full review
75
IndieWireEric KohnMay 18, 2018
More media installation than movie, The Image Book bemoans a vapid world well into the process of disintegration, and his film is engineered to simulate that process in visceral terms. Read full review
75
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 18, 2018
There is something quite reassuring about the fact that — infuriating as it sometimes may be — he has not lost that particular passion nor that roving eye, and that maybe, though he might not admit it, that love of images, too. Read full review
62
Paste MagazineChristina NewlandMay 25, 2018
This could well be the old-man-yells-at-cloud meme in avant-garde cinematic form. Yet amid countless examples of pessimism both verbal and visual, Le Livre D’Image also occasionally ventures into hopefulness. Read full review
60
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyMay 18, 2018
The Image Book if nothing else, is inestimable, in that it defies normal estimation or assessment; to encounter a film this intransigently confrontational by an artist who shows no sign of softening will be a nightmare for many, but yes, for many a privilege and a pleasure. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMay 18, 2018
One imagines Godard spending whole days playing with dials, switches and buttons to discover the very moments he wishes to emphasize in his clips, and a good many of them are passingly arresting. Read full review
40
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 18, 2018
Everything seems designed to disturb or perhaps infuriate the viewer. Read full review
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