Give that donkey the Oscar, surely the best performance in this snoozefest.

Revoke my film nerd credentials if you want, but I think I hated this movie. Bresson’s style is ascetic to a fault—spare and punishing to no effect. Dialogue that doesn’t follow (did I have bad subtitles?) from one sentence to the next, elliptical editing that obscures key details, and acting techniques that border on zombie-like. The effect is like reading a great novel in which everything but verbs has been redacted—you get the gist of something happening, but you’re left too confused to feel anything. I can understand using the medium in new ways to create a tonal poem, but doing so here failed to produce much of an emotional response on my part.

I see now why Bergman thought it was boring.

A severely simple consideration of the insensate nature of fate, delivered through an elusive tale of a donkey and a girl. The sharp cruelty of the world portrayed is contrasted by a collective spiritless performance to develop a unique and amplified emotion to the narrative. A racking oeuvre of Bresson's masterwork in film.

A good concept, marred by a parochialism that leads towards insipidity.