[Robert Bresson's] austere style, emotionless direction, and minimalist scripts can become frustrating if you don’t connect. But there’s a purity in his ambition to pare away everything but the essential elements of cinema.

| May 4, 2024

The style of the film is characteristic of the director... But this time the method defeats itself. In rejecting every irrelevant action, in ruthlessly refining away every decoration, Bresson has thrown away the motives as well.

| Aug 10, 2022

A wonderfully flowing character study which treads the border between sanity and lunacy.

| Jul 7, 2022

It's both seriously tense and infused with intense yearning.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2022

A short and flawless wonder.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 3, 2022

Hypnotically intense and lucid...

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 31, 2022

[Robert] Bresson always choses the most realistic settings and situations. He makes a great use of two of film's most credible devices: the narration and the printed word.

| Jan 23, 2020

At first one may be impressed by the mystery surrounding these characters, until one realises that they are only mysterious because they are unable to create their own destinies.

| Jan 11, 2020

Pickpocket is a film that puts the characters directly into a frame of judgment and asks the viewer if they would really try to understand the character's side of the story.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 25, 2019

Bresson always tells his story obliquely, so he never lets narrative suspense build, or emotional intensity be foregrounded... In short, a masterpiece.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 25, 2019

The movie, above all, affirms the miracle of redemptive love and its price in humility and unconditional surrender.

| Mar 4, 2019

Pickpocket is an intricately staged, truly intimate character study from the imitable Robert Bresson instantly solidifying itself as one of his greatest works.

| Jun 1, 2017

... it's the strange quality of non-actor Martin LaSalle that sets the film apart. Is he as dead inside as he appears to the outside world? His criminal existence alienates him from the people he cares about even as he continues to pursue it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 6, 2014

This mysterious film composed of silence and emptiness accumulates extraordinary power, and unleashes it in a profoundly moving moment.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 3, 2014

Pragmatic to the point of being almost mechanical, Pickpocket it is paradoxically saturated with soulfulness.

| Original Score: 88/100 | Mar 21, 2013

A picture so original in style that it sometimes seems downright peculiar.

| Mar 5, 2013

A marvel of poise and circumspect emotion from French auteur Robert Bresson.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 5, 2013

It is, at base, about self-fulfilment and redemption through love -- a common enough idea in films. But this 1959 epic has seldom been equalled as a philosophical treatise on the subject.

| Mar 5, 2013

Even more than the deadpan anti-thesping, it's the virtuoso thievery sequences (movement, disguise, distraction) that really mesmerise.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 5, 2013

Robert Bresson made this short electrifying study in 1959; it's one of his greatest and purest films, full of hushed transgression and sudden grace.

| Mar 5, 2013