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

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

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

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

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

"Pleasures" becomes as enveloping - and sometimes as awkward - as one of the L'Apollonide ladies' heaving corsets.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 15, 2011

The heavy candlelit chiaroscuro paints the women as mobile Renoirs, Degases and Manets.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 27, 2011

It's a gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail.

| Nov 25, 2011

Among other things, a sharp corrective to such effervescent red-light classics as Max Ophls's "Le Plaisir."

| Nov 23, 2011

Erratic, occasionally WTF hilarious...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 22, 2011

Glamorously louche.

| Nov 22, 2011

A brief history of time and space, according to Bertrand Bonello.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 22, 2011

Without soft-pedaling it-the story of "The Girl Who Laughs" alone will brush away that line of criticism-Bonello nonetheless mourns the extinction of the brothel, where the women at least had each other.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 10, 2011