The irony of the king's death is heightened by its straightforward presentation and procedural approach. The Death of Louis XIV is a very singular formalist filmmaking in its highest order.

| Jul 17, 2020

Serra's representation of a king as prisoner within his own body neatly subverts the tropes of historical dramas about royalty.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 1, 2019

Set almost exclusively in Louis' bedchamber, the film is both boring and riveting, grand and minimal.

| Oct 25, 2018

The Death of Louis XIV shows [Léaud] as a consummate actor in a film composed like a painting that says so much about mortality in so few words. It's unmissable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 17, 2018

Albert Serra imagines the event as though it were a slowly deflating balloon in a burnished Baroque painting, agonizing on all levels but also extraordinarily textured.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 5, 2018

Its fly-on-the-wall depiction of power jostling and slowly escalating desperation in the face of the inevitable eschews heavy-handed symbolism at every turn. In semiotics terms, the film is pure signifier, and therein lies the source of its strength.

| Aug 22, 2018

In the final scenes,... the painterly mise-en-scene and cinematography - golden and ochre hews, Venetian reds, soft camera focus and the glowing whiteness of doctors' caftans, illumined by multiple light sources a la Vermeer - turn death into a feast.

| Aug 8, 2018

Serra self-consciously removes his film from the assaultive world of media. Its slow pace and dark, lush setting require attention but also a forgetting or abandonment of the world outside.

| Apr 26, 2018

A singular, captivating experience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2018

The lugubrious, dusky atmosphere encircling the story requires patience and nerve, but is also poised, touching, and mature.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 1, 2017

Quite movingly, Louis XIV urgently records and archives the presence of a man-an actor-whose entire life has been filmed and projected as extensively as was probably possible for someone of Laud's generation.

| Nov 17, 2017

Whatever the movie's challenges for viewers, I'm grateful that Serra made it.

| Aug 30, 2017

Serra's sad, stately, haunting addition to the slow-cinema genre doubles up as both an intimate study of the Sun King's death and a requiem for Europe's fading arthouse scene.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 17, 2017

[Laud,] remembered by film lovers as the young prince of the Nouvelle Vague, certainly gets you thinking about mortality. Story-wise, though, there's little here for viewers not big on French history.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 17, 2017

Flashes of comedy soon give way to an atmosphere of quiet, inevitable tragedy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2017

One of the most lugubrious movie premises of recent years -- watch King Louis XIV, the Sun King, die slowly, in one dark room, over nearly two hours of screen time -- is here transformed into startling and fresh entertainment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2017

This is less a re-creation of an historical event than a lament for the passing of traditional forms of cinema.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2017

If you like this kind of thing, The Death of Louis XIV is fascinating.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2017

It is sparse in dialogue, heavy in mood, deliberately avoiding dramatics and sentiment unless it should rise in the viewer.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2017

It is a gruelling film but one that weaves a sombre spell.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2017