Ultimately, the film is about relationships: the relationship between broken people, the relationship between human beings and their surroundings, the relationship between war and peace, the relationship between expression and repression.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 26, 2025

A dazzling riff on Melville’s Billy Budd. You’ll never forget the final scene, when the amazing Denis Lavant starts to dance.

| May 2, 2024

The movie is a mass of engorged muscles and entwined limbs; desire rerouted through conformity and cruelty in the rhythm of the night.

| Mar 9, 2023

[Claire] Denis has crafted a psychological portrait as exquisite and harsh as the East African landscape so gorgeously captured by cinematographer Agnès Godard.

| Aug 17, 2022

Ardent and unflinching, Beau Travail looks beyond homoeroticism to the subtle, savage power games of an all-male world.

| May 24, 2022

As soon as the DVD stopped playing, I started watching it again, not sure I'd taken it all in-the film lends itself easily to multiple viewings.

| Feb 2, 2022

Denis tells her story in typically cryptic ellipticals, allowing the film's stunning visual work, forged by legendary French cinematographer Agnès Godard, to convey the layers of complex emotion, desire and futility of Galoup's memory.

| Mar 19, 2021

An astonishingly muscular tale of repressed homosexuality and troubled fixation

| Sep 24, 2020

Crafted as a picture that's meant to be experienced rather than explored.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 19, 2020

We are given motion, gestures, enactment of anachronistic ritual. Raptures and vicissitudes shadow and sinew. The men work, strain, sweat; we are immersed in the routines of these stripped-bare Sisyphuses as they are weighted with inexorable fate.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 16, 2020

Claire Denis's Djibouti-set Beau Travail defies expectations.

| Sep 16, 2020

Cinematographer Agnès Godard captures all this in gorgeous compositions that co-writer/director Denis often presents without dialogue, eloquent exchanges of glances sufficient to communicate resentment or approval.

| Sep 10, 2020

Hypnotic and dreamy, with one of the most ecstatic endings of all time.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 4, 2020

Simple, yet complex Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL is the kind of subtle brilliance that's still relevant over twenty years later.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 4, 2020

Whatever the reason, Denis's stew of barely repressed desire and toxic masculinity is an exceptionally potent brew, one that looks and feels just as ravishing as it did when it first came out.

| Sep 3, 2020

A mélange of brooding appetites, where the inner strife of unanswered desire builds to a conclusion of quiet, tragic violence.

| Mar 27, 2019

| Original Score: A | Sep 7, 2011

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 22, 2005

| Original Score: A | Apr 9, 2005