"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

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

| Jul 24, 2007

Originally released in 1934, Jean Vigo's first and only full-length feature is one of the cinema's greatest masterpieces.

| Jun 24, 2006

A cine-poem ode to the rhythms of life and love set on a barge travelling along the Seine, Jean Vigo's L'Atalante stands as one of cinema's indisputable masterpieces.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 19, 2005

The action is episodic and diffuse but Michel Simon, as the dour and cat-loving barge hand lends a bit of comic relief to the pallidly poetic proceedings.

| May 20, 2003

Stands as one of the most beautiful and rich celebrations of human connection in the history of cinema.

| Apr 22, 2003

This 1934 French classic is a work of enduring poetry that has launched a thousand other movies.

| Mar 10, 2003

L'Atalante is the world in springtime -- a place where shimmering reflections, smoky breezes, empty streets, and a free-floating sense of erotic energy are the essence of life and of movies.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

There is much playfulness and poetry, such visual riches.

| Jan 1, 2000

It is on many lists of the greatest films, a distinction that obscures how down to earth it is, how direct in its story of a new marriage off to a shaky start.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Rapt, exuberant and as fragile as mist, this passionate tone poem drifts in its own bubble of oddly dissonant, almost fatalistic romanticism.

| Jan 1, 2000