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Goodbye to Language(Adieu au langage)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Switzerland, France · 2014
1h 10m
Director Jean-Luc Godard
Starring Jessica Erickson, Héloïse Godet, Zoé Bruneau, Kamel Abdeli
Genre Drama

A 3-D experimental narrative essay film, the film is loosely about a man whose wife is having an affair and the dissolution of their relationship. It is also a highly referential meditation on history and illusion. Director Jean-Luc Godard's own dog Roxy Miéville has a prominent role.

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What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

90

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.

60

CineVue by Ben Nicholson

Godard is not willing to sit back in his dotage but strives to push at the boundaries of the medium, resulting in this rich, witty and thoroughly baffling provocation. Less of a narrative or a thesis than an esoteric patchwork visual essay condemning our fallen society, it's intent on being as abrasive as possible in almost every way.

90

The Dissolve by David Ehrlich

For all of its provocatively cerebral ideas, the prevailing truth is that Goodbye To Language is actually a great deal of fun—not just to think about, but also to experience. It’s “Godard: The Ride.”

83

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

For Godard junkies Goodbye to Language is rich with Godard's temperament—and thus an enjoyable provocation, even if it doesn't all add up. But what Godard movie truly does?

80

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

It’s nice to see this great filmmaker sculpting something that feels genuinely revelatory. That’s not to say that the 3-D Goodbye to Language is always an easy sit.

75

The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton

Godard's full length take on 3D is bold, brilliant and exactly what the format needed — a iconoclast taking it and making his own, and almost every time he frames a shot in three dimensions, from opening credits to the final moments, there's something attention-grabbing going on.

60

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

It is an uncompromising and exasperating 70-minute cine-collage placed before us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, composed of fragments of ideas, shards of disillusionment.

100

Variety by Scott Foundas

As in all Godard’s best work, precise meaning is subsumed in an exhilarating tide of sound and light, impish provocations and inspired philosophizing.

100

Slant Magazine by Steve Macfarlane

Cinema is a vernacular of domination, and quaking with revelations both formal and personal, the film attests that Godard has spent his career apologizing for it.

40

The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

As usual, there are only fragments of thoughts, nothing is developed, and it will be left only to the tiny band of die-hard Godardians to try to make any meaningful sense of the disparate fragments stitched together here.

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