A bourgeois farce made by a filmmaker who is above such silly matters.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 13, 2021

Watching Slack Bay is like listening to a stranger's overlong joke.

| Mar 13, 2020

Dumont glides deliriously into territories so nonsensical he freely blends wistful notes of the grotesque and profane into sacerdotal mystique for a film treatment as profoundly off-putting as it is fascinating.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 9, 2019

It's a cinema of the absurd with a tone reminiscent of Ionesco's The Bald Prima Donna, a bizarre, grotesque black comedy that swerves into inexplicable events, with the joke so over the top that it's stretched as far as it can go.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 17, 2018

By juxtaposing extreme natural beauty with grotesque human figures, Dumont achieves a strange harmony of colliding tones.

| Aug 21, 2018

As a director of landscapes, [Bruno] Dumont still has considerable skill, especially since he's almost as interested in dirt and muck as beauty. As a director of actors, his ability seems to have gone to hell.

| Jul 16, 2018

The light tone is appreciated but the original Bruno Dumont reigns. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 16, 2018

Bizarre seaside farce.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 16, 2018

Slack Bay is not always funny, but it's truly unique and in the long run, more emotionally powerful than might be expected.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 21, 2017

Dumont directs with a sense of whimsy, only becoming serious as it explores the relationship between the teenage characters.

| Dec 16, 2017

With a touch of Tintin and a pinch of Pynchon, it winds back and forth across the Channel coast so that the beautifully crisp natural tones and light bathe the degradation and deformity that perpetually lurks in this raspberry to French history.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 14, 2017

Slack Bay is a very weird concoction that won't be to everyone's taste. Yet this superbly photographed fabrication is, ultimately, strangely compelling.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 8, 2017

Bruno Dumont pushed himself as a filmmaker with his comic detective miniseries "P'tit Quinquin", and now he seems to have confirmed this new direction for the cinema with "Slack Bay", a pratfall-filled coastal tale of crime and love set in the 1910s.

| Nov 16, 2017

... the provocative Ma Loute is in parts subversive, perverse, and politically incorrect, while it fashions a bifurcated study of good and evil, love and hate, and, ultimately, social injustice and the sheer vulgarity of vanity itself.

| Oct 3, 2017

One of the charms, if that's the right word, of Dumont's movie is that the characters never seem to mesh. They are, in their way, a collection of lunatics, particularly the wealthy family.

| Aug 29, 2017

has a lot in common with his mini-series in its Opal Coast location, an odd looking young man (Ma Loute), grisly killings, a bumbling police detective and unexpected flights, but this time Dumont's film has a Monty Python meets Luis Buuel vibe.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 11, 2017

While the trajectory of Dumont's career remains interesting in how stark the shift in his style has become, this baffling oddity marks something of an embarrassing low-point.

| Jul 6, 2017

The surreal, discombobulating Slack Bay sees the director take an even weirder, Pythonesque turn.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 29, 2017

The shenanigans oscillate from dark and distorted to joyously daft but they may prove too wilfully eccentric for some viewers. Others, however, may find delight in such gay abandon.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 27, 2017

I really enjoyed it, but don't blame me if you don't.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 23, 2017