100
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Behind its substantial charm and light touch is a movie that’s more morbid, alienated, and personal than it lets on.
Band of Outsiders (Bande à part)
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- France
- 1964
- · 95m
Director
Jean-Luc Godard
Cast
Anna Karina,
Claude Brasseur,
Sami Frey,
Danièle Girard,
Louisa Colpeyn,
Chantal Darget
Genre
Crime,
Drama,
Romance
Cinephile slackers Franz and Arthur spend their days mimicking the antiheroes of Hollywood Noirs and Westerns while pursuing the lovely Odile. The misfit trio upends convention at every turn, be it through choreographed dances in cafés, or frolicking romps through the Louvre. Eventually, their love of outlaws inspires them to plan their own heist.
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What are critics saying?
100
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
Blends a love of semi-trashy pop entertainment with a love of poetry, art and high moral seriousness. It's a young person's movie (Godard was 34 and Karina 24 in 1964) that retains its mysterious pull even as the film and we get older.
100
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Exhilarating doses of style, imagination, and sheer energy.
100
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
What seems most striking today, in spite of the many moments of comedy and elation, is how painfully candid and personal it is in its despair and disillusionment.
100
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
This lyrical tragicomedy is perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film.
100
Portland Oregonian by Staff (Not Credited)
Godard's 1964 dreamy yet cynical masterwork holds up as a both remarkably sad and thrilling comment on living life as if in a movie. [07 Dec 2001]
100
Variety by Todd McCarthy
After shooting his most expensive film, Godard returned to the streets of Paris for the rough-hewn Band of Outsiders, which is 95 minutes of brilliant visual jazz. [31 Mar 2003, p.42]
100
Observer by Andrew Sarris
Such relaxed filmmaking combined with artistic rigor is no longer feasible. [27 Aug 2001, p.15]
90
Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr
This remains one of Godard's most appealing and underrated films, relatively relaxed and strangely optimistic.
90
Chicago Reader
This remains one of Godard's most appealing and underrated films, relatively relaxed and strangely optimistic.
90
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
The wonderful thing about Band of Outsiders is that the daring elements that jazzed audiences then have the same power to intoxicate all these years later.
90
L.A. Weekly by Ella Taylor
Easily the most brilliant of the genuflections bestowed on the American gangster movie by the French New Wave.
80
Salon by Charles Taylor
Band of Outsiders is about the tyranny of living a life of movie-fed fantasies, and while it makes us see the poverty of those fantasies, it also makes them unaccountably rich, poetic, sad.
80
New Times (L.A.) by Andy Klein
The plot may be nothing, but the film is something indeed.
80
Village Voice by Amy Taubin
Along with Raoul Coutard's radiant cinematography, what makes the film extraordinary is Karina, the pure curves of her face a contradiction to the marionette angularity of her body.
75
New York Daily News by Jami Bernard
The strangely mesmerizing dance contest in "Pulp Fiction" was born of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 New Wave classic Band of Outsiders.
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