| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 30, 2006

Extremely difficult to endure, and if you choose to endure it, it could leave you feeling angry and upset. Nevertheless, this is serious filmmaking, and Noe is a gifted filmmaker.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 9, 2003

A fascinating study in excess, a movie that seduces and repulses as it explores the merciless nature of fate.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2003

There is nothing moral about Irreversible -- only sneeringly superior and nihilistic, like Johnny Rotten at his most fatuous.

| Apr 22, 2003

Fails because of its gratuitous rape and violence and also because of its pretentious and intellectually one-dimensional grounds, which make the violence at the end feel even worse.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2003

A genuine outlaw work of art.

| Apr 11, 2003

Viewers should be warned that Irrversible means what it says: Your experience of this movie can not be forgotten once the die is cast.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 30, 2003

A sometimes repellent yet deeply moving film.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Mar 27, 2003

I hope people who go to see this don't walk out in the first ten minutes or after that scene, because I think you have to experience the entire film. And then you can decide whether or not you're offended by it.

Full Review | Mar 18, 2003

At once overwhelming and inconsequential, harrowing and banal, gimmicky and humourless, overheated and undercooked, this mega-hyped French movie may represent the ultimate triumph of cynicism in the global trade in non-English-language movies.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 14, 2003

It's shock for shock's sake, and No seems to enjoy rubbing our noses in it.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 14, 2003

Is there a point to this spew, a cry against the mongrel violence of men? Or is Noe merely a sadist who enjoys inflicting ugly, pitiless images on his audience?

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 14, 2003

Excruciating exercise in voyeurism, provocation and pretentiousness.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 14, 2003

An integrated work whose form clearly mirrors its content.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 14, 2003

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 14, 2003

The reverse chronology makes Irreversible a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 14, 2003

So formally and stylistically aggressive that this aspect overpowers what it has to say, which isn't much.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 14, 2003

It's a gritty, vicious assault on the senses, one that very nearly evaporates due to writer-director Gaspar No's short-changing of the narrative.

| Original Score: C- | Mar 13, 2003

Once the shock wears off and feeling returns to the extremities, Irreversible is unmistakably life-altering and affirming.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 13, 2003

Convinces me as nothing else so far that I have reached the point of diminishing returns with movies that pretend to be profound by having their pulpy, banal stories told backwards and sideways and upside-down.

| Mar 13, 2003