Your Company
 

Bastards(Les Salauds)

✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

France, Germany · 2013
1h 40m
Director Claire Denis
Starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Michel Subor
Genre Crime, Drama, Thriller

When he hears about his brother-in-law's suicide, Marco returns to Paris and finds his sister, Sandra. She tells him the man she believes is responsible for the suicide and her daughter's hospitalization due to sexual abuse. Marco sets out on a path for revenge but is oblivious to the true cause of the tragic events.

Stream Bastards

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

80

Time Out by

If Bastards is cold, it’s never clinical; rather, it’s a fully engaged, deeply moral movie about people who are neither.

50

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Bogged down by flashbacks and flash forwards, The Bastards pointlessly mixes up its ingredients, creating a distancing effect from the tangible sadness at its core. The result is the rare case of a movie that confirms its maker's skill while wasting it on useless ambition.

88

Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo

Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.

67

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

The Bastards feels like what happens when an undeniably great filmmaker stoops to sensationalism -- it’s a smarter, odder film than someone else would make with the same material, but it’s still smart, odd sensationalism.

50

Village Voice by Nick Schager

Style can't fully compensate for a tale that, underneath its gorgeous affectations, proves undercooked, especially during a third act that provides duly titillating answers to its initially beguiling mysteries.

40

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Denis's drama intrigues more than it actually delivers...Sleight of hand is all well and good. But sooner or later a film must pay up.

80

Variety by Scott Foundas

Even at its most opaque, Bastards always exerts a dreamlike pull rooted in Denis’ rhythmic layerings of image, sound and music.

Users who liked this film also liked