In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.
An absurdly comic assault on the meaningless social rituals and polite hypocrisies of the upper middle class.
– Gary Dowell,
Dallas Morning News,
24 Jan 2002
fresh:
Take a look again at its dream sequences, especially the nocturnal one involving the young man in the side street, and you will see a master disturber still at work.
– Peter Rainer,
New York Magazine/Vulture,
16 Jan 2003
rotten:
The chic stylishness of the characters comes over as overbearing rather than satirically revealing.
– Geoff Andrew,
Time Out,
26 Jan 2006
fresh:
Luis Bunuel adds another fine film to his solid record with this surrealistically oriented tale of so-called bourgeois types.
– Variety Staff,
Variety,
4 Dec 2008
fresh:
Luis Bunuel's 1972 comic masterpiece, about three well-to-do couples who try and fail to have a meal together, is perhaps the most perfectly achieved and executed of all his late French films.