"AN UNDISTILLED JOLT OF PURE MOVIEGOING JOUISSANCE! MAY BE AS CLOSE TO A PERFECT FILM AS EXISTS!"
– Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal

"THE ULYSSES OF MOVING PICTURES!"
– David Fear, Time Out New York

(1974) “Once upon a time...” “Twice upon a time... thrice upon a time...” And crimson-curl-topped librarian Dominique Labourier’s Julie sees brunette Godard regular Juliet Berto’s Céline — for the first time — as she’s dazedly staggering through a park. But then, as they rapidly become best friends, the weird connections proliferate: Labourier is hooked on magic, Berto is a professional magician (with a haughtily bizarre act); Berto pretends to be Labourier at a meeting with an old flame, Labourier hilariously and disastrously subs for Berto at an important audition; and they both take turns as the nanny at the house Berto had been fleeing from originally, the home of the very strangely behaving Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, and Barbet Schroeder — only trouble is, neither can remember more than fragments of what happens there. But as the magic lozenge and clover drinks start to kick in, those repeated-variations-fragments start to coalesce. Despite the freshness and spontaneity, there was almost no improvisation: Berto and Labourier, already close friends off screen, sketched out their characters with director Rivette, scenarist Eduardo de Gregorio worked out the basic story line, and all four actresses then wrote their own lines to fit. Farce, puzzle, fairy tale, Alice in Wonderland, Alfred Hitchcock, and female buddy picture all at once, Céline and Julie do go boating, but “aller en bateau” also means colloquially to be “taken for a ride.”  Approximately 193 minutes.
A NEW YORKER FILMS RELEASE

REVIEWS

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[highest rating]
"This is the rare breezy three-plus hours that manages to explore heady concepts without once feeling labored. Much of the film’s buoyancy has to do with the indelible onscreen pairing of Berto and Labourier; the further they descend into their virtual wonderland, the more infectious the duo’s natural enthusiasm becomes. By the time they’ve taken full control of the movie’s alternate universe—as the melodrama morphs with marvelous ease into a musical comedy—you feel like anything is possible. Cinema this alive is a rare bird, indeed."
– Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

"Rivette's signature special effect is the uncanny impression that the story is being generated by the characters as we watch; or, spookier and more thrilling still, by the very act of our watching... it’s not just that Celine and Julie holds up to repeat viewings; its very point is its seemingly infinite repeatability, its mysterious capacity to surprise both first-time viewers and those who know it as well as a magician reciting an incantation."
– Dennis Lim, The New York Times
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"THE VERY ESSENCE OF CINEMATIC IMAGINATION!"
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Generations of enchanted devotees have delighted in its frisky engagement with Lewis Carroll's looking-glass realms, Louis Feuillade's silent-era serials, and Jorge Luis Borges's affinity for phantom doubles and the musty revelations of the antique and arcane... The film's charmed spirit has infiltrated pop culture as well, from Desperately Seeking Susan to Mulholland Dr., although nothing is as affecting as the thing itself."
– Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal

"A universally worshipped counter-classic that giddily resists summary of any kind... The Movies in vitro, Celine and Julie is an amateurish, whimsical three-hour epic that is only and entirely 'about' the peculiarly, almost frighteningly delicious act of watching it, and if you let it it could change everything."
– Michael Atkinson, The L Magazine

"A recipe for cinematic joie de vivre! Celine and Julie is verdant, airy, and playful — at once a leisurely exercise in narrativity, a comic rite of spring, an extended riff, a genial incantation, and a feminist buddy film."
– J. Hoberman, Artinfo
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"SUBLIME! A mix of literary and cinema homage though ultimately sui generis... Its greatest descendant is David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation."
– Melissa Anderson, Village Voice
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"RIVETTE'S MASTERPIECE!" – Keith Uhlich, Slant Magazine

“The elaborate Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue with the Argentinian magical realist Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials). Over its 193 minutes, the wonders never cease.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

“There’s cinema, and then there’s Céline and Julie Go Boating. Rivette’s free-form dissertation on the interzone between performance and spectatorship is the ideal filmgoing experience, even as the ‘story’ transcends all long-standing rules of narrative engagement.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York

“ONE OF THE MOST ACCESSIBLY ENIGMATIC JEWELS OF THE FRENCH NEW WAVE! Three-plus hours of delightfully maddening intricacy that reek not of musty masterwork, but rather of effortless, exhilarating play... Rivette’s narrative is as antic and resistant to boundaries as his heroines; he weaves cinematic and self-reference with sublime assurance and wit.”
– Michelle Orange, Village Voice

Click here to read Joseph Jon Lanthier's Slant Magazine review of Celine and Julie Go Boating.