Though never an outright comedy, Jessica Hausner draws a gently humorous tale out of mystery and ambiguity. There are many ways films about faith can go wrong, but Lourdes always, and admirably stays on the right side of that equation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 25, 2024

Lourdes doesn't manage to cross the boundaries that its own thesis proposes, straying from the possibility of an emotional response. [Full review in Spanish]

| Oct 4, 2022

Hausner's quietly provocative piece of arthouse cinema is a great example of her ever-expanding oeuvre as she continues her ingenious investigation into human behaviour.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 13, 2021

Hausner's 'Lourdes' handles religious faith and miracles with delicacy

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Hausner directs with a kind of tremulous beauty, every frame, every nuance has a kind of gossamer perfection, luring the audience into a kind of spiritual experience all its own.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 7, 2019

[Jessica Hausner's] thought experiment is an emotionally potent one.

| Sep 24, 2014

Hausner frequently composes pictures in which our view is cut off by a wall, a pillar, or a pilgrim ... but like God's silence, these obstructions remain impenetrable.

| Original Score: A | Jun 12, 2012

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 17, 2011

The withholding of judgment persists across Lourdes, which is comic, haunting, sweet, pious, unsettling, agnostic, and wholly deadpan at various moments.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 4, 2011

Movies about miracles range from the awful to the unwatchable... that all changes with Jessica Hausner's Lourdes; it's a visually-striking, beautifully-realised, emotionally-devastating drama that both salutes and skewers the deeply-religious.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 30, 2011

[An] aesthetically and tonally controlled knockout.

| Original Score: A- | Nov 21, 2010

One of the most observant -- and enigmatic -- movies of the year.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 13, 2010

An odd, dispassionate religious film that will likely be more powerful for skeptics than true believers, it manages to most strongly suggest the possibility of grace by so clinically observing its opposite.

| Original Score: 66/100 | Jul 18, 2010

Spiritually flawed and often cynical though Hausner's pilgrims undoubtedly are, they're all too recognisably human.

| Jul 6, 2010

The film was primarily shot on location, which gives it a heaviness, an historic weight, that dominates the movie much more than anything to do with character or plot does.

| Original Score: 8/10 | May 21, 2010

This off-centre film looks like a paean to devotion ... and yet Hausner quietly and cleverly undermines this

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 4, 2010

In a film rich with provocative questions, Hausner audaciously examines the ambivalent nature of miracles. Are they gifts from a loving God or random occurrences, bereft of any moral or meaning?

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 1, 2010

Hausner manages and controls our expectations in this superbly subtle, mysterious and brilliantly composed film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 26, 2010

At the heart of the film is Sylvie Testud, one of the most beguiling actresses in the world, and whom I would happily pay to watch do nothing more than sleep for 24 hours.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 25, 2010

A film featuring the kind of compelling, textured female character that most serious Hollywood actresses would trade at least a decade's worth of Botox to get their claws into.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 25, 2010