70
There's a compulsion to describe a film with such a slow and unusual pace as poetic - it already has a Netflix blurb calling it "lyrical" - but Bestiaire's best quality is its unpretentiousness.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Tediousness sets in eventually; there's only so much zoological abyss-gazing one can do.
80
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
This may not be a fuzzy wuzzy, warm-and-cuddly song to animals, but in revealing the everyday, sometimes repellent surrealism of the park - where zebras, elephants, camels and ostriches walk among slowly moving cars, and lions bang wildly against their small cages - he forces you to look at the often unseen. It may not be pretty, but it is essential viewing.
70
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Bestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.
63
The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.