Popular reviews

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  Review by Tony (tectactoe) ★★★★★ 4

  [99]

  Saw this many years ago and loved it, though never really considered it might be one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. (Indeed, it is.) Buñuel extends his surrealist poke-funnery beyond just the bourgeoisie and the religious—though they’re certainly targeted, too—to humans as a whole, scrutinizing societal norms, conventions, rituals, taboos, habits, purported "freedoms," and everything in between. Constantly abstract and void of any obvious rib-nudging, the baton-passing form -- something that Linklater would adapt for SLACKER -- takes us from one absurd scenario to the next, ranging from hilarious, to uncomfortable, to hauntingly accurate : the “Sniper as Hero” segment e.g. feels decades ahead of its time, esp. considering the dense panegyrics today’s media rains unto clearly…

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★★ 2

  It's amazing that Bunuel was able to remain this youthful and creative into his 70s. His films from this era are some of the most creative and bizarre of his career yet what keeps them entertaining is the constant subversion of your expectations.

  His concepts wouldn't work if the actors didn't take so seriously the world they were living in. Each one has their irrational motivations that they are determined to fulfill. When a scene begins to feel conventional, you can't help but feel he's about to throw something crazy in there. It's a fun and alluring style.

  This film is held back slightly from the other surreal Bunuel classic from the same time, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie simply because of its disjointedness. Each section was funny but it played more like a short film, being distantly connected to the last. Still it feels like a natural followup and an expansion on the ideas he was putting to screen.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 6

  Catching Up with Buñuel

  For me—so far, at least—Buñuel's funniest

  Žižek made the most salient point about this in his Pervert's Guides: it's all about ideology. The movie is funny because it imagines a world where everything is exactly the same, but the ideology has shifted three degrees to the left, has been heightened and exaggerated, has been flipped upside-down.

  A dinner party turns into a bathroom party, everyone sitting on toilets instead of chairs, with a private dining room for when you just can't hold it in any longer (the hunger, that is). A couple's child disappears from class one day—she's right there, sitting patiently, of course, but now she's ~officially been declared missing~ (it’s been registered in the…

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  Review by russman ★★★½ 1

  Monks know how to party

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 9

  Ostriches, moral relativity, iconoclasms, chance vs. necessity—what does it all mean? Buñuel, in my opinion, had this incredible ability to reveal the most outré notions and behaviors humans exhibit through what appear to be meaningless sequences of events, but are actually carefully constructed criticisms and expositions of those most uncomfortable subjects and truths which we all have a tendency to shy away from and ignore out of a compulsory need to uphold and maintain this fallacy of decency and morality we have subconsciously agreed to. This comes, I believe, from a place of genuine psychological self-preservation and to unpack these subjects outright would simply be too much for people to handle. So what does Buñuel do? He makes The Phantom…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 16

  At this point in his storied career, Buñuel was just having fun and you can’t help but love it. Poking holes in the bourgeois conventions—the ‘social injustices’ as he called them—that keep us feeling repressed and are, at the end of the day, silly and meaningless, as the toilet dinner table scene clearly indicates. Buñuel is asking us to pull our dumb heads out of the sand and realize that we can’t hide from all of the totally ridiculous double-binds and prickly hypocrisies that define our existence, while showing how susceptible we are to the truly malevolent evils of inexplicability when we’re busy playing our stupid human window-dressing-and-gesturing games. Only after we confront and attempt to rectify these issues can we think about what actual freedom and liberty might look like in a surreally modern world that has only gotten more bizarre and unpredictable as of late.

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  Review by nick ★★★½

  Buñuel's surrealist satire is always something to behold. The Phantom of Liberty may not be his career best since the sketches can be uneven and confusing, but the highs are high enough to counterbalance the lows.

  Documenting a series of bizarre happenings that are loosely connected, this is as Buñuel as it gets, showing off its provocative, sometimes indecipherable metaphors poking fun at an imaginary world where social norms and logic are broken and rebuilt. I wish I'd understood more hidden messages here, but this is a delightful experience nonetheless.

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  Review by shookone ★★½

  Buñuel remains (es)strange(d) to me. He develops abstract ideas and pours them into fragments that must remain static and "unfilmic". The nodes are incoherent at times, the characters are always laughed at sarcastically. One idea = 5 minutes sequence construct. The time difference is particularly difficult for me because you could do so much more after Buñuel - him being a main source for a (even commercially successful) cinema to come, up to the success of a Lanthimos or Östlund today.

  This is where my basic problem comes from, because it rarely goes far enough for me; as a cinematic construct I still only consider SIMÓN DEL DESIERTO to be the most successful one (and the one, of all things,…

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  Review by Graham ★★★★½ 5

  A Frenchman lies in bed next to Monica Vitti as a giant chicken walks into the room. He ponders the moment, considering his daughter being handed grotesque pictures by a stranger in a raincoat (of historical buildings) as the postman cycles up to his bed and drops off the mail. 

  An ostrich enters, surveying the scene. 

  This is not the setup for some elaborate joke. No, welcome to the weird, surrealist world of Luis Buñuel. Brilliant.

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  Criterion Channel Takedown: 09 - Luis Buñuel

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  Review by DNA cinephile🏳️‍🌈 ★★★★★ 4

  The Phantom of Liberty. 1974. Directed by Luis Buñel.

  Buñel’s free association film “The Phantom of Liberty” is among Buñel’s last three films and aside from “Belle de Jour” is my favorite. “The Phantom of Liberty” is a surrealist’s dream come true. In other, no pun intended. I like the surrealism of this film. It is Buñel’s lack of a formal beginning, middle, and end to this body of work that makes it so interesting upon each viewing. It is like an ego with ADHD at its best telling stories. Indeed, it was Buñel’s understanding of Dadaism, anarchism, and complete disregard for form that lead to this gem. It is has been a delightful two days in which Allison and…

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  Review by panos75 ★★★★

  A series of loosely connected vignettes taking place (mostly) in contemporary France and satirizing modern society, morality, and religion.

  Luis Bunuel's penultimate feature is a delightfully absurdist comedy that barely follows any of the established narrative rules, and takes no prisoners when it comes to his favorite targets (the Catholic church, the middle class, the law enforcement). There is only minimal connective tissue among the stories and its total randomness makes the proceedings even more unexpectedly surrealistic. A wide array of themes is touched upon by the Spanish director but the main one seems to be how relative the concept of morality can be among people of different backgrounds. But even those who recoil when faced with such high concepts…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★½ 8

  The final segment's ending reminds of El Ángel Exterminador (1962); the only difference is that you shouldn't make a meaning out of it. Since La Voie Lactée (1969), Buñuel was now irremediably obsessed with religion and contradictions. Since the religious side had already been explored, it was the turn for, once again and for the last time, mocking at the "relativity of moral consensus". You cannot argue with Buñuel's logic (except religion; he was quite ignorant). Artistic freedom had always been his 24-fps dream.

  90/100