A strange and bittersweet triumph.
Comment
05/24/03
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 CriticIf you can see past the heavy-handed religious overtones you will encounter an inspired and deeply intelligent Bresson classic.
04/27/09
Top CriticThe film is perhaps the director's most perfectly realised, and certainly his most moving.
06/24/06
Top CriticA sublime cinematic experience.
10/15/03
This is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar.
04/25/03
Quietly devastating, nearly perfect allegory.
04/09/04
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04/17/04
Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.
04/27/09
Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and Au Hasard Balthazar is his most heartbreaking prayer.
03/19/04
Top CriticIt is a devastating picture, scored to a Schubert piano sonata and done with a purity and austerity that transfixes us.
03/18/04
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
Each scene emerges as a minor miracle. Which makes the sum total an object of extraordinary glory.
06/24/05
Bresson’s most poetic, haunting, personal work.
06/20/05
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
One of cinema's greatest achievements.
10/02/03
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
Robert Bresson's aesthetic of realist, material sounds and images assembled in paradoxical ways virtually defines the cinematic parable...
06/14/05
Bresson is one of the few directors for whom cinema was both an aesthetic and spiritual pursuit, a search that was reflected in films for which the words 'sublime,' 'transcendent' and 'masterpiece' can seem somehow lacking.
12/11/03
Top CriticThis 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 CriticA 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
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