If you can see past the heavy-handed religious overtones you will encounter an inspired and deeply intelligent Bresson classic.
Comment
04/27/09
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
100
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:28
Fresh:28
Rotten:0
Average Rating:9.1/10
Reviews for Au Hasard Balthazar
Top CriticThe film is perhaps the director's most perfectly realised, and certainly his most moving.
06/24/06
Top CriticA strange and bittersweet triumph.
05/24/03
Top CriticPerhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.
04/27/09
likely as lost on today's audience as the saintly donkey that bears man's burdens on his back only to be beaten, neglected and, finally, rejected.
07/22/08
The film does maintain a powerful mood throughout, a kind of stringency, and the fate of the humans fades into insignificance as the film draws to a bleak close.
05/30/08
It's a study of human weakness and cruelty, it's a portrait of Christ the suffering servant, it's the heartbreaking story of a young girl's descent from innocence to despair. But above all, it's a movie about a donkey.
09/01/06
Bresson's greatest masterpiece.
11/09/05
A deft, impassioned, and wrenching film, but also — emphatically, absurdly — a film about a donkey. Indeed, it hardly pretends to be much more.
07/26/05
Each scene emerges as a minor miracle. Which makes the sum total an object of extraordinary glory.
06/24/05
The lens of dispassion Bresson invites us to look through during Balthazar embodies "a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it."
06/22/05
Bresson’s most poetic, haunting, personal work.
06/20/05
Robert Bresson's aesthetic of realist, material sounds and images assembled in paradoxical ways virtually defines the cinematic parable...
06/14/05
This is what makes Au Hasard Balthazar so powerful, and yet so distant. It asks as much of its audience as it does of its characters...
06/14/05
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.
05/09/05
Top CriticClick to read the article
04/17/04
Quietly devastating, nearly perfect allegory.
04/09/04
[In Au hasard Balthazar] the suffering is tempered...with the sense of small relief for the quiet little donkey that captured my heart.
04/01/04
The most modern equivalent of [Balthazar's] final scene may be the ending of Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves."
03/31/04
Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and Au Hasard Balthazar is his most heartbreaking prayer.
03/19/04
Top CriticWhat’s Hot On RT
Other News
Fresh Links
Featured
RT on YouTube 
Subscribe to RT's YouTube channel and don't miss a second of our cracking video content.
RT on Twitter
Follow Rotten Tomatoes and join us as we tweet about the week's releases.
IGN RSS Feeds