71
Metascore
7 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 88Slant MagazineSlant MagazineBestiaire argues persuasively without words, making a case without explicating one at all.
- 80The New York TimesManohla DargisThe New York TimesManohla DargisThis may not be a fuzzy wuzzy, warm-and-cuddly song to animals, but in revealing the everyday, sometimes repellent surrealism of the park - where zebras, elephants, camels and ostriches walk among slowly moving cars, and lions bang wildly against their small cages - he forces you to look at the often unseen. It may not be pretty, but it is essential viewing.
- The film has a meditative calm about it — there are only a few murmured words of French but nothing that could be called dialogue — with also some underlying tension, because as you look at the animals, they so often look back, their inscrutable consciousness both placid and unyielding.
- 70Village VoiceMelissa AndersonVillage VoiceMelissa AndersonBestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.
- 63Boston GlobeWesley MorrisBoston GlobeWesley MorrisThe images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.
- 60Time OutKeith UhlichTime OutKeith UhlichTediousness sets in eventually; there's only so much zoological abyss-gazing one can do.