Bold and bracingly provocative, this French romantic thriller layers Lynchian disorientation with some mind-bendingly complex sci-fi ideas while maintaining an unusually strong interior life.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 15, 2024

Bonello’s film is slow, it purposefully simmers, and as it does the cinematography masterfully utilizes repetition...The Beast isn’t just smart, it’s deftly crafted and lingers long after the credits end.

Full Review | Original Score: 84/100 | May 5, 2024

The universal themes of love and loneliness, coupled with Seydoux’s terrific performance make Bertrand Bonello's latest film a knockout. The visionary filmmaker fills you with intrigue and leaves you enthralled.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 1, 2024

Bonello’s genre-bending dystopian drama is not for everyone, it can be an endurance test for some but Léa Seydoux's magnetic performance keeps it engaging.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 26, 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.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Apr 26, 2024

Seydoux and McKay are directed for deliberately slow, methodical interaction. Bonello depicts past, present and future showcasing Seydoux’s versatility playing characters through different eras in a haunting, complicated, frightening history of romance.

Full Review | Apr 26, 2024

It’s a weird sweeping romance and sci-fi dystopia mix that taps into so many contemporary anxieties.

Full Review | Apr 26, 2024

The Beast is a mesmerizing examination of our reluctance to open ourselves up to vulnerability and authentic experiences, as well as the barriers we establish out of self-preservation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 26, 2024

The more abstract and surreal that French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello's The Beast gets, the more beguiling and affecting it becomes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 25, 2024

The Beast is a lush affair, gorgeous to look at and nimble in the way themes echo across eras. It’s also an elegant reminder that an unruly heart is nothing to silence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 25, 2024

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

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

It feels like he’s an artist in search of the perfect color combination. His restless nature makes all his films, including The Beast, worth seeking out and seeing on the biggest screen possible.

Full Review | Apr 24, 2024

... An ambitious and somewhat long film about a love like no other. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 22, 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.

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

What prevails in The Beasts is dehumanization and disagreement. In this, the film is faithful to the novel by Henry James. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 22, 2024

Bertrand Bonello uses science fiction and three distant timelines to build a story around the advance of individualism and the glorification of disaffection that impacts human bonds. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Apr 22, 2024

Sure, it becomes a bit creepy-crawly in the telling, but oh what a complete package of ideas, images and existential themes the extremist Bonello -- and bewitching Seydoux -- give us to ponder.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 20, 2024

Three periods, two great performances, and one of the year’s best, The Beast.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Apr 20, 2024

Outrageous, beautiful, horrific, tender, ugly, us at our most vulnerable, most open to and reliant upon AI. An artistic triumph that serves as a warning to the future us in a seductive, sensual black bath of enclosure and “purification”.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 19, 2024

If David Lynch had directed “Somewhere in Time,” it might have looked a bit like Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast.”

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 19, 2024