L'Atlante is poetic, surrealist, and sick of romanticism with a burning fever. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jan 20, 2023

... the sole feature from French filmmaker Jean Vigo is a vision of everyday poetry.

| Jan 7, 2023

It is very good, spasmodically great poetry applied to pretty good prose; a great talent trying, I judge, to apply itself so far as it can stand to, conventionally and commercially.

| Jun 28, 2021

The chief thing about the film is the quality of Vigo as a director. He tells the right story; he tells it in a style peculiar to himself. It is an exciting style.

| Feb 2, 2021

...a simultaneously gritty and poetical romance...

| Oct 21, 2020

Vigo captured the splendor of life itself.

| Aug 4, 2020

It becomes a mesmerising personal vision thanks to Vigo's sophisticated blend of fairy-tale romance, documentary realism, surrealist fantasy, bawdy humour and working-class song.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 22, 2019

True filmic poetry which turns a simple love story into a raw and off-beat fairytale. Given its monumental reputation, L'Atalante does not disappoint.

| Jul 22, 2019

Again, and unrepentantly, I call attention to the purity of Vigo's filmic conception, to his genius for presenting the world to us in subjective terms, in terms of the secret and not the public life of the human being.

| Jul 22, 2019

While each of Vigo's films stands starkly apart from the others, L'Atalante is, for many, Vigo's masterwork.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 6, 2019

Although the film left me emotionally unmoved, I recognize its importance to a generation of future filmmakers.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 29, 2019

"L'Atalante" is about how the world, in its wonder and cruelty, is both for and against lovers, often dizzyingly so.

| Oct 4, 2018

An exhibition in technical ingenuity and visual storytelling that was way ahead of its time.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 20, 2012

L'Atalante manages to be more modern than anything being made today.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 19, 2012

Generous tides of life and longing flow through this buoyant masterpiece.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 10, 2012

easily Vigo's most "commercial" film, but it never loses the essence of his more abstract and poetic sensibilities

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 21, 2011

The film has a weird kind of poetry and beauty about it that is hard -- perhaps impossible -- to describe.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 26, 2011

A major inspiration to subsequent generations of filmmakers, yet no one has ever succeeded in matching it.

| Jul 24, 2007

One can't help but mourn the films an even more mature, capable and confident Vigo might have made had not TB cut him down at the tender age of 29

| Original Score: 85/100 | Apr 7, 2007

Blending naturalism and surrealism, this is a work of unique poetic power, a masterpiece that anticipated neo-realism by a decade; the fact that it's Vigo sole completed feature doesn't lessen his status as one of the world's greatest filmmakers.

| Original Score: A | Jan 24, 2007