Bonnello’s formally daring dystopia pairs an equally chameleonic Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in a time-hopping puzzle box that’s as romantic as it is skin-crawling, constantly second-guessing us while staying three steps ahead.

| Jan 2, 2025

It passes through my eyes like a QR code, one of those that you scan without feeling anything. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 23, 2024

Although a cerebral film, it’s arguably Bonello’s most accessible. The compartmentalised structure makes the runtime more than palatable, and the repeated symbols and motifs he uses throughout are clear in their utility

| Original Score: 3 | Sep 4, 2024

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a glorious and twisted century-spanning romance that is a playful, absurd, and utterly terrifying indictment on historical and modern societal issues.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 3, 2024

There may not have been much beef, but there was plenty of bull.

| Aug 23, 2024

Part of the experience of watching Bonello’s masterpiece is the longing for something more.

| Aug 23, 2024

Bertrand Bonello’s film proves as richly complicated and compelling as the forces of feeling it seeks to depict.

| Aug 13, 2024

The Beast is a disappointingly baffling experience that has an intriguing enough premise and set-up, as well as some handsome production values, but is significantly let down by a misguided direction that betrays the ultimate concept.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 5, 2024

The Beast gives a sense of an artist burrowing deep inside his material (and his moment) and emerging with something vital. It’s fearless filmmaking.

| Jul 23, 2024

The Beast can be chilling, tragic, even horrific ... But it’s also quite beautiful, in its way, as it considers the fear of feeling, the fear of loving, and what it means to be human.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 21, 2024

About halfway through Bertrand Bonello’s insanely knotty new picture – a Spaghetti Junction of semi-discrete timelines – one version of Léa Seydoux gives in to frustration. “What the f**k are you talking about!” she yells into the ether. What indeed?

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 13, 2024

Bonello’s film is a haunting monument to humans as their own worst enemy.

| Jul 10, 2024

3 intertwined eras. In each, passion—thwarted, subsuming—consumes and drowns. Sometimes you come up for air; sometimes you can’t... Seydoux’s a marvel, a superhero. She sustains multitudes.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 4, 2024

With this elliptical storytelling style and a penchant for the existential and mysterious, Bonello is sometimes confounding. But the movie, as head-scratching and frustrating as it is, stays with the viewer long after it’s over.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 3, 2024

A transcendent sci-fi epic.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 2, 2024

Bonello has a singular gift: He doesn’t make horror films, and yet he finds a way to make a scene of such unimaginable terror that it casts a tone on the whole rest of the movie.

| Jun 30, 2024

The Beast is what it wants to be: a slice of thought-provoking, nightmarish science fiction that rewards the viewer emotionally and visually.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 29, 2024

The Beast is compelling science fiction that taps into modern concerns about AI and how it is altering our relationships with art and one another. If you had the choice to remove fear but it meant you would also lose love, what would you do?

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2024

A romance for an uncertain future, The Beast holds love and loss as one.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2024

Against any rhyme or reason, it works.

| Jun 5, 2024