Kino Lorber | Release Date: October 29, 2014 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
20
Mixed:
6
Negative:
2
|
Watch Now
Critic Reviews
When all is said and done, Goodbye to Language may simply be about Jean-Luc Godard exploring 3-D filmmaking, in the same way “The Shining” is really just about Stanley Kubrick wanting to fart around with a Steadicam. Which, honestly, is fine. Great artists use new tools to discover new vehicles for seeing, understanding, living. Be thankful we get to come along for the ride.
Read full review
In what I think may be the filmmaker’s plan, all that stuff — that maddeningly cacophonous Stuff — is what we’re meant to cut through and get past in order to become as alert and alive as the star of Mr. Godard’s movie. In this interpretation, it’s the pooch who points the way toward perceiving beauty by learning to live in the vibrant, fragrant present.
Read full review
I’ve now seen Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film twice, and I think I might be one more viewing away from finally being able to say what the hell it’s about. That sounds like a condemnation, but a film you need to see again should be a film you want to see again, and the oblique beauty of Goodbye to Language, shot in 3-D, has a tractor-beam-like pull.
Read full review
I enjoyed this movie more thoroughly, and more liberated from frustration and ambivalence, than anything Godard has made in at least 20 years. It provided me with an interpretive frame that may even lead me back to another crack at “Notre Musique” (2004) and “For Ever Mozart” (1996) and most of all the extraordinary 1988-1998 video documentary series “Histoire(s) du cinéma.”
Read full review
Goodbye to Language is the kind of cinematic essay that Godard has come to specialize in; it’s really a montage of thoughts, aphorisms, and images, and not a story, although there are some consistent characters (often naked – and how better to hold our interest in their philosophical queries?) and one dog.
Read full review
The PlaylistMay 24, 2014
Godard is not willing to sit back in his dotage but strives to push at the boundaries of the medium, resulting in this rich, witty and thoroughly baffling provocation. Less of a narrative or a thesis than an esoteric patchwork visual essay condemning our fallen society, it's intent on being as abrasive as possible in almost every way.
Read full review
The best we can do, Goodbye to Language suggests, is to be as attuned, instinctive and spontaneous as beasts in a state of nature. Or maybe that’s not what the movie is saying at all. Godard leaves his enterprise adamantly open-ended, the better for viewers to supply their own metaphors, meanings and moral implications.
Read full review
Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
Essential Links