Catherine Breillat's story of forbidden love will slide under your skin.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 20, 2024

Last Summer isn’t sexually explicit in the manner of some of Breillat’s earlier features, such as the 1999 Romance. All the same, it’s a provocation, as well as a gripping story.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 12, 2024

That’s the character of the film as a whole: cataclysmic events taking place amid lovely, languid scenery and civil (or at least sophisticated) conversation.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 12, 2024

“Last Summer” is a work of artfully sustained sexual suspense.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 12, 2024

To be clear: Breillat isn’t justifying Anne’s affair or, on a larger scale, telling a story with any universal resonance. She’s exploring how this particular sinner did the unforgivable — and then committed even more sins trying to cover it up.

| Jul 12, 2024

The narrative is too flat, too drily filmed by César-nominated cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie to induce much emotion or debate about Anne’s hypocrisy and abuse of power.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 11, 2024

French provocateur Catherine Breillat explores age gap relationships with complexity and truth in Last Summer.

| Jul 10, 2024

If anything, “Last Summer” is more commercial-looking and less shocking than much of Breillat’s previous work, but her eye and her insights are sharp as ever.

| Jul 3, 2024

Last Summer is my favorite of Breillat’s movies to date, because its allegiance to aesthetics collides with its story in a way that feels bracingly confrontational and unrepentant.

| Jul 1, 2024

A family drama as masterfully propulsive as a horror movie.

| Jul 1, 2024

One can lodge the complaint that Last Summer is redundant, though Breillat’s aims differ significantly from el-Toukhy’s. The trouble lies instead with the inconsistency and loathsomeness of these aims.

| Jul 1, 2024

A story about a woman who — after entrancing and appalling you — emerges as both more monstrous and more human than you’re prepared for.

| Jul 1, 2024

Breillat's new film, a fiercely antagonistic tale of an incestuous affair, is both a long-delayed return to work and an artistic self-renewal.

| Jun 28, 2024

Breillat’s approach is technically intimate yet tonally detached -- languid as a summer’s day, sometimes unbearably so, and often uncomfortably warm.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 28, 2024

A drama expertly modulated to raise both eyebrows and pulse rates, led by a superb Léa Drucker performance that’s rooted in uncontrollable self-destructive passions and intense self-preservation instincts.

| Jun 28, 2024

Last Summer is a provocation and a melodrama, and yet in Ms. Breillat’s hands these characters are precisely rendered humans -- in their sensitivities, their wants, their vile follies.

| Jun 28, 2024

Catherine Breillat’s provocative new film is like a watercolor dabbed with cyanide.

| Jun 27, 2024

Last Summer is less compelled by crime and punishment than it is by the soft mysteries that people struggle to solve within themselves. Rationales abound, but answers remain as elusive as the logic of a dream.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 26, 2024

Breillat skillfully addresses the anxiety of Anne’s lost youth while showing the unfortunate consequences of Theo’s flirtation with adulthood.

| Oct 26, 2023

Breillat’s sharp writing and even sharper camera make for a cinematic challenge, a cinematic gem.

| Sep 18, 2023