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

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

Against any rhyme or reason, it works.

| Jun 5, 2024

The Beast won’t be for everyone, but submit to its looping structure and beguiling dream logic, and this extremely loose adaptation of a novella by Henry James weaves a bewitching, if a trifle head-swimming spell.

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

Like a painting, The Beast is best seen once, pondered and then left as a memory.

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

To paraphrase the smartest line from Tenet, don’t try to understand The Beast, you just have to feel it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2024

Instead, this sensual, cerebral work simply reminds us what is possible when ambitious filmmakers put their mind to it — and how long the result can stay in ours.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 31, 2024

Bonello has created a wholly original work that pulses with prescience.

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

This is a bold and visionary film, an innovative modern sci-fi that feels both fresh and original. It delves into generational trauma and female oppression, whilst exploring an array of modern issues such as alienation and toxic masculinity. A must-see.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 22, 2024

"The Beast," a riff on a 1903 Henry James novella that has flashes of remarkable atmosphere but has trouble congealing into a cohesive whole.

| Original Score: C | Apr 26, 2024

[Bonello] comes nowhere near achieving anything as insightful in two and a half hours that James manages in 30 pages.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 25, 2024

A multi-genre/multi-century sci-fi philosophical whatchamacallit that wears out its welcome two-thirds of the way into a nearly two-and-a-half hour running time.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 22, 2024

Even when it's not entirely clear where or when we are, Bonello's filmmaking is so hypnotic, and Seydoux's performance so subtly mesmerizing, that you can't help getting caught up in the flow.

| Apr 18, 2024

Classical and ultramodern, The Beast is an experience both bold and rich.

| Apr 18, 2024

It's very slow and convoluted.

| Apr 17, 2024

Its devotion to the untamed territory of the human heart, its artfully discombobulating time and locale shifts, the shifting personae handled with marvelous fluidity by Seydoux; it takes you somewhere, and more than one somewhere.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 12, 2024

Although the film can be talky and didactic at times, Seydoux and MacKay sell the high concept, generating a real erotic charge just by touching hands.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 12, 2024

It’s a textually dense, formally ambitious, and supremely engaging, genre-melding treatise on fear and love.

| Apr 11, 2024

The film can be mystifying at time, even confusing, with all that switching around and lack of explaining, but it’s never confused. Keeping an eye on Seydoux’s hairstyles is the best way to follow when’s when and where’s where.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 8, 2024

It’s easier to admire the structural gambit of the film — to marvel at the scope of its genre-blending, century-jumping architecture — than to be drawn into its melodrama.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 6, 2024