Read Alain Robbe-Grillet's obituary in the New York Times

Feature on Robbe-Grillet in the Sunday New York Times

[FIVE STARS]
"THRILLINGLY HYPNOTIC! VOLUPTUOUS! One of the strangest artifacts of cinema history… no other film has affected fashion as deeply."
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

"A GORGEOUS PUZZLE BOX OF A MOVIE… To revisit Marienbad today is to glimpse a vanished moment when American audiences drank in European films not because they were universal or 'relatable,' but for their otherness, their impenetrability, their definite contrast to the simplistic and elephantine Technicolor epics that much of Hollywood was then embracing… Manhattan cinephiles may find themselves as mystified and delighted as their counterparts in 1962."
– Mark Harris, The New York Times (January 13, 2008). Click here to read feature

“Last Year at Marienbad recalls not just a style of filmmaking—glacial, intense, contemptuous of easy explanations—but a whole epoch of filmgoing, in which the burdens of European cinema were loaded into late-night discussion… Seeing the film again, and succumbing, like a dance partner, to its gliding moves, one has to ask: how could a film this beautiful ever have been thought unapproachable?”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker. Click here to read review

"Hopelessly retro, eternally avant-garde, and one of the most influential movies ever made (as well as one of the most reviled), Marienbad is both utterly lucid and provocatively opaque… It eludes tense. The movie is what it is—a sustained mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment outside of time, and a shocking intimation of perfection."
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice. Click here to read full review

"STILL A KICK TO WATCH! It's a formal masterpiece… Remains audacious now because no one really makes movies like this anymore. Its mystery is forever intact. THERE'S NOTHING ELSE LIKE IT."
– Steve Dollar, The New York Sun. Click here to read full review

"Last Year at Marienbad is from another time in the evolution of the cinema."
– Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer. Click here to read full review

"DO SEE THIS PICTURE. I'll be wishing I was seeing it with you quite frequently, I reckon…" – Glenn Kenny, Premiere

"When was the last time you spent a weekend at an old French manor wth gowns designed by Coco Chanel and hair sleek enough to eat? Might you have something of the sort in store for this upcoming Martin Luther King Day weekend? If only! Or, if you stay in town long enough to see Last Year at Marienbad. The '60s art house smash will play by way of a new print for two weeks at Film Forum and even the trailer—so gorgeous and steeped in mystery— has the capacity to stun."
– Andy Battaglia, The Onion

"A narrative whirlpool of hallucinogenic frenzy… A daringly abstract construction no less unconventional than it was in 1961. This hypnotic production turns the human condition into a deliriously cockeyed fever dream."
– Eric Kohn, New York Press. Read full review here

(1961) As ominous organ music resounds, the Scope camera tracks through the seemingly endless halls of a baroque grand hotel — alternately thronged with tuxedoes and gowns or echoingly deserted — as Giorgio Albertazzi tries to persuade an initially disbelieving Delphine Seyrig (in gowns by Chanel — Coco herself!) that they’d met the year before, even as the sepulchral Sacha Pitoëff (her husband?) hovers about, continually beating all comers in a kind of pick-up-sticks game. Simple enough, right? But as Albertazzi continues to repeat “Last year… ” each encounter takes place in different locations, in different costumes, the alterations not just coming from scene to scene but from shot to shot — at one point Seyrig seemingly steps forward in a perfect match cut despite spanning completely different sets — with his remembrances becoming more and more detailed and personal, amid actually mounting suspense, until the question becomes not only did it happen, but was it seduction or… ? All this as their fellow guests alternate among relatively realistic crowd scenes, poses frozen in place as the principals walk past them, and a de Chirico-like composition amid the lavish grounds where the people cast extremely long shadows but the shrubbery casts none. Perhaps the ultimate puzzle film, with dizzying time shifts and flashbacks, real or imagined—or are they shifts into the subjunctive? Possible solutions have included the Orpheus-Eurydice myth; a visualization of the process of psychoanalysis; or the whole as a kind of stream-of-consciousness of a single mind, encompassing truth, lies, and visualized whatifs. But the list could go on, and usually does, as vehement post-film discussions. Technically, however, it’s easy to agree that Marienbad is a tour de force, with Sacha Vierny’s lusciously velvet black and white photography of the incredibly lavish interior of — mainly — Nymphenburg castle in Bavaria; with the debuting Seyrig’s feathery peignoir probably an homage to Evelyn Brent in von Sternberg’s Underworld; and the horror film-worthy organ score by Seyrig’s brother Francis. With Oscar-nominated screenplay by nouveau roman titan Alain Robbe-Grillet, who now sits in the Académie Française. One of the most iconic and "referenced" art films of all time, Marienbad has been homaged in everything from Calvin Klein "Obsession" ads in the 80s, to Marc Jacobs' Fall 2007 collection, to British band Blur's music video "To the End."
A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE.

Links:

• British band Blur's video "To the End," a pastiche of Last Year at Marienbad, on YouTube
• Watch the film trailer