Click here to watch a video review by Ty Burr and Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe

"Jean-Luc Godard's radiant, ambiguous, serenely perverse Contempt, 45 this year, is being revived again, in startling color and elegant, ribbony CinemaScope… and it's beginning to look like one of those movies we can't do without for very long: a classic… ITS AUDACITY IS BREATHTAKING!"
– Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times. Click here to read feature

(Highest rating!)
"Godard’s most gorgeously fabricated movie—his most movieish movie!"
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

"They don't make them like this anymore. Point of fact, they never did; Godard's Contempt is a once-a-century cultural constellation."
– Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice. Click here to read review

(1963) That's what ex-typist Brigitte Bardot has for husband playwright/screenwriter Michel Piccoli—but why? Does she think he used her to get that lucrative assignment (to rewrite an adaptation of The Odyssey) from overbearing American producer Jack Palance (“I like gods. I know exactly how they feel”)? Was it that (innocent) fanny pat to multilingual interpreter Giorgia Moll? Or does she just “not love him anymore?” New Wave wild man Godard, given international stars, a best selling novel by Alberto Moravia, two high-maintenance producers (Joseph E. Levine and Carlo Ponti), and the biggest budget of his career, still succeeded, as usual, in overturning the conventions of mainstream filmmaking, while producing a meditation on post-Hollywood filmmaking; the pitfalls of international productions; CinemaScope (“only for snakes and funerals,” chortles Lang); imposing modern psychological interpretations on classical themes; and Bardot’s derrière. From the beginning, as Godard’s voiceover recites the credits and his cameraman Raoul Coutard films at Rome’s Cinecittà; Piccoli meets Palance amid endless side-tracking shots; Lang (playing “Fritz Lang”), in the screening room, casually switches from English to French to German—with a Prego thrown in—as Giorgia Moll simultaneously translates (sometimes with a twist) for monoglots Palance and Piccoli; and a studiedly fake death scene; we’re obviously in Godardland. But a tour de force 30-minute sequence that never strays from the Bardot/Piccoli apartment, with the couple hashing over their problems in seeming “real time” amid carefully complex mise en scène, could fit easily into a Bergman heart-searcher. (Although Piccoli also sports a cigar and hat in his bath in homage to Dean Martin in Some Came Running.) Godard’s most sun-splashed production, unfolding amid the airiest and most fabulous of apartments and villas, and against dazzling seascapes, with a complex color scheme featuring a retina-searing red - always the same shade - on robes, railings, convertibles, etc. And with Godard himself as Lang’s Assistant Director in the final scene. Approx. 102 min.
A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE.

• GODARD'S 60s FESTIVAL AT FILM FORUM, MAY 2-29

"One of the masterworks of modern cinema that has influenced a generation of filmmakers… What makes Contempt so unique a viewing experience, even more than in 1963, is the way it stimulates an audience's attention as well as its senses… Godardians regard Contempt as an anomaly, the master's most 'orthodox' movie. The paradox is that it may also be his finest...with Contempt Godard was able to strike his deepest human chords."
– Phillip Lopate, The New York Times

“Thirty years later, it seems like an elegy for European art cinema, at once tragic and serene. This myth of baleful movie gods is also the story of Godard’s victory over temptation. Lashed to the mast of irascible genius, he heard the song of the sirens and lived to tell the tale.”
– J. Hoberman

“Brilliant, romantic and genuinely tragic.
It's also one of the greatest films ever made about the actual process of moviemaking."
– Martin Scorsese

“One of the defining moments of modernist filmmaking, a movie that takes place amid the smoldering ruins of the studio system, creating much of the language and spirit of the new cinema even as it deeply, solemnly mourns the loss of the old. A film that teeters between filial loyalty and Oedipal revolt, between allegiance to a unified, classical system and an angry impatience to get on with the new, Contempt is one of those works in which you can feel the aesthetic ground shifting beneath your feet. Like a Cezanne still life or a Sullivan skyscraper, it yields a low rumble—the sound of rules changing…With its widescreen image restored, its multilingual soundtrack returned, and its dazzling, pop-art colors refurbished, Contempt is now ready to retake its place in film history as the richest film of Godard’s first period, and perhaps the most complete and satisfying career of his entire career."
– Dave Kehr, Film Comment

“Restored, refreshed, and still raring to offend the cinema status quo. A lament—for both cinema and love, Godard’s two great themes, and for the sad fact that people always have their reasons.”
– John Anderson, Newsday

“The ravishing new print brightens the glow of greatness that has surrounded Contempt ever since it first appeared in 1963. It is not simply an acid satire on filmmaking, and a cruel act of worship toward the myth of Bardot, but a larger look at the way in which we helplessly cast others as the unwilling co-stars in our own lives."
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

"Godard's most savagely romantic film has never looked better!" – Time Out New York