The rebelliousness of the French New Wave, the embrace of invention, are all there. And it’s a work of sophistication and formal elegance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 15, 2025

Chronicling a tense interlude in the life of a pop star, as she waits for a medical diagnosis, it was an innovative, widely seen success.

| Mar 22, 2024

From a place of fearless independence, Varda’s film investigates the nature of female identity with a series of thematic and formal contradictions.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 29, 2023

[Agnes] Varda captures the vibrant social world and its easy rhythms in creamy black and white with graceful long takes, bringing an almost tactile quality to Cléo’s personal odyssey...

| Dec 18, 2022

“Cléo from 5 to 7” is La Nouvelle Vague through and through.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

Cleo is thus both the freest of films and the film that is the greater prisoner of constraints, the most natural and the most formal, the most realistic and the most precious, the most moving to see and the most pleasant to watch.

| Apr 5, 2022

It is full of understanding and heart, focusing on a single character whose story is representative of names and faces we pass by every day.

| Mar 21, 2022

Agnes Varda has accomplished a really impressive stint in directing the picture. writing the scenario, adapting it to film form and doing the dialogue.

| Feb 17, 2022

Cleo is a fascinating experiment in subjective reporting. It looks beautiful, and because it is absolutely attentive to the realities of the character it has a moving purity and humour, without any sentimentality at all.

| Feb 17, 2022

The movie Is the work of Agnes Varda, one of France's new wave directors. She brings an imaginative camera to the girl's wanderings.

| Feb 17, 2022

The passage of time has been kinder to [Varda's] films than some of theirs, and Cléo from 5 to 7 plays today as startlingly modern. Released in 1962, it seems as innovative and influential as any New Wave film.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 17, 2022

It is different and let us enjoy it for its difference. Also let us thank Agnes Varda for some thoughtful and delicate direction.

| Feb 17, 2022

Miss Varda's cameraman, Jean Rabier, gets around everywhere -- by taxi, car, bus and on foot -- and we are with him every inch of the way. I can't imagine a more enjoyable way to see and hear the City of Light.

| Feb 17, 2022

While one is immediately drawn toward the originality, beauty and perception of Agnes Varda's technique of cinema, the French movie maker has strapped herself with an impossible assignment... For all her adventurous efforts, [Cleo] does not come off.

| Feb 17, 2022

Cleo, from 5 to 7, is a French film of all sorts of special distinctions. Two of these are the performance of lovely, young Corinne Marchand as Cleo and the direction of the film by Agnes Varda, who also wrote the screenplay.

| Feb 17, 2022

At present, the French and other foreign film producers seem too enamored of the camera, using it for unusual or artistic shots at the expense of the characters and action of the story.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 17, 2022

Agnes Varda, whose novel approach to featurettes has given her a reputation is one of the founders of the French "New Wave" movies, is the producer, director, adapter and scenarist for Cleo. Her technique is arresting.

| Feb 17, 2022

Miss Varda has wrought this ending with delicacy and compassion. The film is Interesting, although It does become a bit monotonous In its endless shots of the seedy side of Paris.

| Feb 17, 2022

The last few seconds of Cleo are sheer poetry.

| Feb 17, 2022

The originality of this New Wave French film made by Agnes Varda is that it doesn't telescope time or place. It follows every move Cleo makes -- every one. If a taxi ride takes six minutes, the screen time is six minutes.

| Feb 17, 2022