The director was reportedly in despair at the random violence of Italian society just before his death; that despair permeates his final work and gives it a posthumous significance.

| Mar 7, 2023

Salo is a beautifully photographed and thoughtful film,

| Aug 19, 2022

Disgusting, terrible, awful, no good...

| Dec 8, 2021

The messaging here feels blunt and unsophisticated to modern eyes.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 16, 2020

It makes its point about Fascism, and Pasolini's artistic sense is obvious in every frame, but the film becomes an endurance contest to see if you can make it to the bitter end without vomiting.

| May 29, 2020

There was a point to all this foulness; Pasolini was commenting on the dehumanising effect of fascism, with reference to Proust, Nietzsche and Dante's circles of Hell. You'll still want a shower afterwards, though.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 28, 2019

Saló still holds up to this day as one of the most sodomising films to ever brace our screens, and rightly gained its controversial status in the cinema industry.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 14, 2019

Salò offers a lesson in how to depict cruelty without re-enacting it -- a lesson few filmmakers even want to learn.

| Aug 30, 2019

It reflects the libertines excesses and deconstructs them, making the audience complicit in their horrors by our passivity, not unlike the German citizens who sat idly by while Hitler slaughtered millions.

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

Stately horror, brute and luxe... unsavory reputation comes from reviewers who seethe at surfaces and not the hardly subterranean political text. (It's more picture-mirror than mere picture in these cases.)

| Jun 18, 2019

Salo... is forceful only in making the viewer want to turn away.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 4, 2018

What is evident in the film is its power of provocation, very much within the spirit of the famous Marquis... [Full review in Spanish]

| Feb 8, 2018

It's a masterpiece, still the most convincing representation of human cruelty in the history of the cinema.

| Nov 27, 2017

This film is essential to have seen but impossible to watch: a viewer may find life itself defiled beyond redemption by the simple fact that such things can be shown or even imagined.

| Apr 25, 2016

Its themes are so severe as to feel like a howl of despair more than an articulate statement of radical politics. But it is pure cinema

| Apr 27, 2015

I can't think of a reason in the world that anyone should subject him or herself to this.

| Jan 7, 2012

Pasolini illustrates his belief that society forces people to conform by making his victims turn on each other, then making the audience complicit. Just by watching, we are voyeurs, and Pasolini calls us out in the movie's final moments.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 27, 2011

By reputation alone, owning Sal should be enough to impress your cinephilic friends; watching it with them will be whole lot harder.

| Sep 30, 2010

Dramatically feral and artistically fertile, "Salo" is a rigorous movie that dares to use the metaphor of torture as a device of utter physical and psychological annihilation for both the victim and the torturer.

| Original Score: A+ | Jul 11, 2009

It's very hard to sit through and offers no insights whatsoever into power, politics, history or sexuality. Nasty stuff.

| Oct 18, 2008