Based on the true story of a 17th-century nun, who both claimed to be able to perform miracles and quietly pursued a lesbian affair in her convent, the Dutch-born director's newest drama will have viewers blushing into their popcorn.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2024

The film relishes that sort of impious thinking in a colourful, mordant tale.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 24, 2022

The ceremonial restraint that defines contemporary mainstream lesbian romances like Carol and Disobedience is here abandoned with, well, abandon. ... To add to the viewers distress, the picture is as deafeningly loud as it is tiresomely provocative.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 15, 2022

Lurches between entertainingly camp and shamelessly lurid.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 15, 2022

In Benedetta, master provocateur Paul Verhoeven demolishes the line between the sacred and the profane.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 14, 2022

It could only be more deeply Paul Verhoeven if RoboCop strode in to take the veil.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 13, 2022

A funny, filthy, iconoclastic riot. Paul Verhoeven’s latest erotic satire won’t be for all creeds, but it is bursting with enough ideas that even doubters can find something to believe in here.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 13, 2022

A cheeky tall tale from a master provocateur.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 11, 2022

Whatever reactions Verhoeven hopes to elicit during the film’s final half-hour, numbness surely couldn’t be among them. Let us be grateful, though, that at 83 years old he remains as iconoclastic, and as unable to rein himself in, as ever.

| Apr 6, 2022

Whatever your take on the film there’s no denying that it’s superbly directed and acted (Lambert Wilson as the Papal Nuncio is particularly impressive) and despite, or because of, the director’s obsessions, perversely enjoyable.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 17, 2022

enedetta is Verhoeven’s sincere, sometimes profoundly moving, attempt to do the same thing with a woman who has become an infamous historical figure.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 12, 2022

Will Benedetta's personal relationship with God spare their Tuscan town from mass death, or will her forbidden sapphism be both her and the village's demise? You're going to want to find out - trust me.

| Jan 6, 2022

A truly strange brew, coupling probing, thoughtful questions of faith and religion with the kind of sexual ribaldry and scatological humor you'd expect from a picture that's already being shorthanded as "the lesbian nun movie."

| Dec 28, 2021

If you go into Benedetta wanting sacrilege, you will technically find it. But if you're queer, sacrilege is nothing new.

| Dec 21, 2021

Verhoeven does, mixing lurid, cynical exploitation with fluid storytelling and the principled irreverence of a satirist whose art always punches up against institutional dogma and scores a knockout.

| Dec 21, 2021

...a bawdy, pot-stirring satire of religious chastity...

| Dec 11, 2021

A lot but not quite enough, Benedetta has the odd distinction of being both OTT and underwhelming...While some zealots may find Verhoeven's latest to be irreligious, for many others, it simply preaches to the choir.

| Dec 10, 2021

A very fun, very naked, very blasphemous movie.

| Dec 8, 2021

Paul Verhoeven brings exquisite artistry to this stranger-than-fiction tale, delivering a biopic full of outrageous moments with a sophisticated yet wicked wit.

| Dec 4, 2021

The film is a biting examination of Catholicism with a sly sense of humor.

| Dec 4, 2021