And yet BPM (meaning beats per minute) is a beautiful film, full of drama and humour, love and politics, argument and action.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 18, 2018

It doesn't try to be a comforting film, and it certainly isn't. It's strident, unwieldy and confronting.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 18, 2018

Rebotini's dissonant, humming, house-inflected score - and the metronome-like heartbeats that underscore the action - are reminders that, even on their deathbed, a person has a pulse. In its dying gasps, the film grasps at life.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 8, 2018

There are elements to admire - committed performances and noble intentions - but as cinema it's a non-starter.

| Apr 6, 2018

Fly on the wall filmmaking at its best, this is pure cinema - an enthralling, enveloping experience that seizes you fully, effortlessly mixing politics, sex, life, death and art.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 6, 2018

Perhaps more impressively [director Robin Campillo] squeezes drama from the group meetings, which in most films would be snooze-fests.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 6, 2018

120 BPM understands that conflict is not abuse and that comrades need not be friends. It immerses us in tangled lives of passion and anger on their own terms of tenderness, frustration, charisma, mess, pride, fury, pain, laughter, intimacy and bitterness.

| Apr 5, 2018

The film captures very vividly indeed the urgency and turbulence of the period in which the AIDS epidemic took hold.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 4, 2018

"BPM" is an affecting memorial about being alive and being heard - a movie that says the only things that matter in life are love, righteous struggle, and the joy of being with others. It shakes all three until their atoms get up and dance.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 1, 2018

However, in our current age in which social media has become the message, BPM is a good reminder that when physical bodies aren't present on the front lines their silence can very well indeed equal death.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 25, 2018

The confidence and clarity of Robin Campillo's writing is evident from the film's opening scene.

| Dec 28, 2017

[Director] Campillo tries to give both personal and political equal weight (or at least equal screen time), and proves more adept at the latter: never have highly regulated meetings to propose policy and review results been so richly engaging.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 17, 2017

[BPM] devotes significant screen time to philosophical debate but also appeals to the senses with graphic sex and a throbbing techno score by Arnaud Rebotini.

| Nov 16, 2017

"BPM" is often exhilarating and ultimately moving, but it makes few concessions to audiences without a strong preexisting interest in its subject.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 16, 2017

BPM (Beats Per Minute) wrecked me something fierce, Campillo's latest a piece of historical fiction that's just as relevant today as it ever was a quarter-century ago.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 15, 2017

A restless, engrossing dramatic portrait of Parisian activists fighting the AIDS pandemic in the early 1990s.

| Nov 2, 2017

However specific its time frame and focus, BPM is not a narrow nostalgia piece, nor will it ever be as long as people are still dying, still being vilified.

| Oct 30, 2017

Here, as characters hit the streets for demonstrations, hit the discos to relax and hit the skids when they get sick, you're there with them, pulse pounding out more beats per minute than you might have thought possible.

| Oct 26, 2017

"BPM" is a true and committed document, a worthy piece of filmmaking that keeps faith with the people it memorializes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 26, 2017

BPM resists becoming a tragedy, even as it documents one. You could say it resists becoming the resistance, too, but there'll always be a chance to make that movie. In the meantime, Campillo has given us a hard-won, loving look at history.

| Oct 25, 2017