Knife + Heart is at once of its time and timeless. The design, the synth score, the amour fou — everything feels like it’s been plucked from the Brian De Palma and Dario Argento films of the 70s.

| Jun 5, 2024

This French film is every bit as sexy as it is harrowing. It’s an edge-of-your-seat thriller imbued with the power of seduction.

| Nov 16, 2022

A dreamlike homage to the giallo.

| Oct 27, 2022

If this was just a mood board, then it would get two big thumbs up, but as an actual movie with a plot, we need a little bit more. Paradis' acid blonde hair looks great against the neon, but a weave does not a film make.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 1, 2021

An intoxicatingly rich text, beguiling and thoughtful in its conception of queer cinema as a medium of long-buried desires and fantasies.

| Dec 15, 2020

I was really mesmerized by the characters... [but] they drop off.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 22, 2020

It is rich in potential and when it works it sings. When it stumbles, it can oftentimes wind up actively unlikable.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 21, 2020

Its humor is the strongest aspect due to the film's surrendering to its shallower desires, but the realizations of deeper themes are portentous.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 24, 2020

Overall, then, Knife + Heart is a lavish visual gift with a remarkable soundscape and plenty else to recommend it.

| Jul 21, 2020

A heavily stylized, giallo-inspired, queer slasher about a masked, dildo-knife-wielding serial killer stalking a low-budget gay porn crew in late-1970s Paris? Damn, Knife+Heart, you had my full attention from the word go.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 30, 2020

Knife + Heart may not have a particularly complex script or offer substantial novelties to what has been seen in dozens of giallos, but its director has managed to build a work of great visual beauty. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 20, 2020

A difficult balance that miraculously manages not to derail despite its playful excess. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Apr 13, 2020

Knife + Heart is a postmodern pastiche where the eroticism of Brian De Palma's thrillers is intertwined with the exuberance of Dario Argento's giallos. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2020

While unevenly paced and unevenly out-there, Knife + Heart is a ready-made introduction to a fringe world of killing and queerness...

| Dec 5, 2019

The film has a big heart sometimes for the victims, and yet the deaths are so sadistic and so brutal... It didn't have the empathy that I thought it should have.

| Sep 24, 2019

Knife+Heart is nothing if not stunning in its 70s aesthetic with film grain, sumptuous neon glows, and synth score [even if the climax] feels more convenient than fulfilling.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 3, 2019

...thwarted by filmmaker Yann Gonzalez's excessively avant-garde sensibilities and an emphasis on a progressively tedious narrative.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 2, 2019

[Knife + Heart] could have fit perfectly in the 70s era of grindhouse films, Euro/Italian gialli and De Palma-esqe psychological thrillers.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 16, 2019

Variously gorgeous, ethereal, artful and tacky, both Anne's film and Gonzalez's are sustained by a throbbing sexual energy, aided by French electronic act M83's twinkling, club‑inspired score.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 12, 2019

Yann Gonzalez wants the giallo to make a modern comeback, and honestly?

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 12, 2019