Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Last Year at Marienbad falls into the dreaded and/or hallowed not-for-everyone category, along with such film school staples as The Seventh Seal, 8 1/2, and L'Avventura.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 28, 2024

Resnais has a beautiful way of deconstructing reality, challenging the way we think about the world through the romance of desire. As uncomfortable as it is to say, facts don’t really have much business in the realm of love.

| Nov 8, 2024

More than nearly any other film, the sense of Marienbad’s characters being definite people is particularly abstract.

| Sep 15, 2024

You may not know what it all means, even after repeat viewings, but it’s so gorgeous it will sweep you away, and maybe that’s the ultimate significance of its peerless, mystifying aesthetic.

| May 16, 2024

Enthusiasts for the film start arguing about whether something happened last year at Marienbad, and this becomes rather more important than what happens on the screen in front of them -- which isn't much.

| Sep 11, 2023

It's extraordinary how nothing feels out of place, how well it seems to extract a form of artistic meaning from its meaninglessness.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 6, 2023

It flows past one’s eyes with the suavity and never-to-be-questioned illogic of a dream, and indeed it may be that we are intended to perceive that its story is a sort of dream within a dream.

| Aug 15, 2022

So basically the Eagles watched this, said ‘wait a second,’ and wrote “Hotel California.” It’s also got the world’s most amped-up organ player going HAM on every stanza.

| Jun 9, 2022

It was a strange film but it really drew me in and I'm glad I have finally seen Last Year at Marienbad.

| Apr 1, 2021

Every shot is filled with beauty and with mystery.

| Dec 15, 2020

A treatise on memory and longing, of ideas lost to the fog of time, shards of dreams scattered across a marble floor.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 5, 2019

It is a charade, a masque, beautiful to the eyes -- I can't remember a film of more sustained visual delight -- and interesting to the mind, or at least to the crossword-puzzle-solving part of the mind, but curiously lacking in emotional affect.

| Aug 14, 2019

Undulant in the brain... imagery shimmying and shimmering and splintered, Resnais' snoot-cock at chi-chi is both mordant and adoring. Yet there is more to do than to look or listen passively: it must be invented in the watching.

| Original Score: 10/10 | May 27, 2019

The story's obscurity turns out to result from its protagonists' own efforts to deny or blur their painful past.

| May 13, 2019

A pioneering, essential work of arthouse cinema that remains as enrapturing and illusive as ever.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 12, 2018

Last Year in Marienbad remains a dazzling, spellbinding and iconic work of 1960s cinema.

| Oct 30, 2018

If you're a hipster who loves highly stylised French cinema of the 1960s New Wave this might be a treat. For the rest of us, it's unwatchable.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 14, 2018

It's more rewarding to treat the film as a poem, drinking in the icily majestic images, and realising that wherever Resnais' endless tracking shots are leading, it's not towards meaning.

| Dec 6, 2017

The visual moments that remain in the mind are without exception locked into place by the intensity of the score.

| Nov 15, 2017

[VIDEO ESSAY] Alain Resnais's transcendent filmic parlor game remains an innovative and exquisitely executed example of minimalist filmmaking, used to evoke mystery, romance, and a sprinkle social invective.

| Original Score: A+ | Aug 18, 2014