For all its references to defeat, however, the movie still conveys a sense of rapture with the process of image-making, if not necessarily filmmaking.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
In typical Godardian fashion the film manages to be both strident and elusive, argumentative and opaque.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Designed as their own entity, the brief subtitles convey so little that to get the full experience you won't only need to understand Godard's language. You'll also have to speak French.
Film Socialism is a weighty, intentionally cryptic product that's easy on the eyes and heavy on the mind.
Film Socialisme deflects interpretation but, so long as one subscribes to the William Carlos Williams injunction "No ideas but in things," it's filled with sensuous pleasures.
As to the movie's three sections, the best comes first, as an eclectic "cast" of characters (among them philosopher Alain Badiou and musician Patti Smith) pontificate their way around a lavish Mediterranean cruise ship.
Film Socialisme, his (Godard) latest intellectual assault, includes grating noise, scruffy camera-phone video and subtitles in fractured "Navajo English."
Boxoffice Magazine by Richard Mowe
Devotees and the curious may find it mildly diverting, otherwise this effort is not for the faint-headed.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
This film is an affront. It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies.
You would be hard-pressed to use the word "accessible" to describe Film Socialisme, and that's exactly the way the master wants it.