Bonello resists crystallizing his subjects by neither romanticizing nor condemning them, preferring instead to consider their time between work, the textures they inhabit, the joys and humiliations they endure, and, above all, their layers of humanity.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 30, 2024

Audacious. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 4, 2022

At once repellant and enthralling,exotic and familiar, but never anything short of fascinating.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 6, 2019

Yet there is something else here, mysterious, practically intangible within the confines both of the brothel and the genre, something that leaves the film a lingering quality like smoke left hanging in a vacated room, traces, ghosts, remnants.

| Nov 16, 2017

Nothing in this film comes as a surprise, but Bonello's intent to show the place backstage as well as onstage is fulfilled and pertinent, even though the period setting gives the picture a curio air.

| Jun 19, 2013

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jan 24, 2013

Bonello is more interested in the women's relationships with each other than with their rich clients, though we do get to see them living out some of their patrons' kinky desires.

| May 30, 2012

It's about forcing us to think about people we never would otherwise and seeing their struggles and humanity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 29, 2012

What gives the film its haunting pull, as well as its feminist undercurrent, is the filmmaker's palpable compassion for these women.

| Mar 7, 2012

There's plenty of flesh on display but the stories are far from erotic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2012

Bertrand Bonello's visually alluring glimpse of what prostitute's do during down time. Captivating at times, but it does go on.

| Original Score: B | Feb 17, 2012

No one, male or female, has any fun, but the men behave as if they do. They are all half-stupefied by the languor in which they drown.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 9, 2012

It emphasizes setting over character and plot; and it casts a mood that's both eerie and entrancing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 9, 2012

The film is superbly designed to suggest the oppressive, hypocritical haut-bourgeois decor, the obsessive eroticism that excludes real desire, and the languorous timelessness that makes one day like another.

| Jan 29, 2012

We watch with various degrees of either fascination or boredom as the girls go about their work wondering how long it or they will last.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2012

Here to prove that misogyny never quite goes out of style in the cinema, French director Bertrand Bonello presents this wearisome, questionable spectacle.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 26, 2012

Dazzling and deep. You'll want to go back for more.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 26, 2012

Bertrand Bonello's atmospheric, poetic film seduces you with all the skill and subtlety of the courtesans it depicts.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2012

Seductive on the surface, steely underneath, this is an angry, fascinating, highly political film all wrapped up in costumed frilliness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2012

Erotically charged but overlong and untroubled by too much plotting.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 23, 2012