Featuring mostly real porn performers, Thyberg sought to detail the world in all its seedy glory, as it vacillates between the sexy and the grotesque.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Working with cinematographer Sophie Winqvist Loggins, writer-director Thyberg finds ingenious angles and original choreography to shoot pornographic shoots. For all the nudity and thrusting on screen no one could describe Pleasure as voyeuristic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2022

This is an immersive and unflinching narrative whirl through the LA porn industry, with no blushes spared.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 17, 2022

Kappel’s astounding performance constantly draws the film’s energy back to her in a way that ensures the audience is never in doubt of Linnea’s own agency, even in her most vulnerable moments.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 16, 2022

Thyberg’s film doesn’t smack of an agenda. Among performers paid to fake passion, it feels dispassionate.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 16, 2022

There’s more to this topic than a single feature could possibly cover, particularly a debut one. But Thyberg knows which angles she wants to work – and my goodness, does she go for it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 16, 2022

An interesting and even pioneering film on this issue because it is explicitly about consent...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 15, 2022

Feels like the first film of its kind.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 13, 2022

An unflinching, fascinating look at a profession from the inside and out.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 24, 2022

"Daring," I suppose, could be used to describe this film... But I don't think we really learn much about this world.

| May 21, 2022

Alternates between visual provocations (more Gaspar Noé than Paul Verhoeven) and the nuts-and-bolts behind the porn business.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 20, 2022

These slice-of-life details, while sporadic, make Pleasure compelling, offering a distinct perspective on a creative process that can be mundane but seems always at risk of spinning out of control.

| May 19, 2022

Pleasure is compelling and persuasive, with a lingering resonance that will likely affect how — or if — its audience watches porn in the future.

| Original Score: B+ | May 17, 2022

A welcome, fascinating, difficult and ruthlessly provocative thing to swallow.

| May 16, 2022

A portrait of a business in which men use women for their own ends, and then convince those same women that this is how things operate—and, as a result, that they should behave likewise.

| May 14, 2022

But it’s Kappel, an actress with neither experience in the porn industry nor film, who turns in a star-making performance as Bella. She balances showing not just the insecurity and fear felt by this actress, but the joy too.

| May 13, 2022

Beneath all the bold subject matter, Pleasure is a disappointingly standard cautionary showbiz story about someone who pursues her dream of stardom with single-minded intensity until she realizes the pursuit has turned her into someone she doesn’t like.

| May 13, 2022

An arresting workplace drama-meets-bildungsroman that demystifies the adult film industry without flat-out demonizing it – a delicate balance to strike.

| May 13, 2022

Though in no way a docudrama, Pleasure is astonishingly persuasive in its depiction of the cold technicalities of porn production.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 13, 2022

Thyberg keeps her cards close throughout Pleasure, using the film’s verité framing to obscure the extent of her involvement as a director. The film feels even-handed, in the sense that its fly-on-the-wall style lets situations speak for themselves.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 13, 2022