Film Forum

(2014, Jean-Luc Godard) A mediation on philosophy, infinity, and Godard’s own dog, with custom-made 3-D camera rigs conjuring breathtaking, eye-bending effects. Winner of Jury Prize at Cannes. DCP. Approx. 70 mins.

Reviews

“Jean-Luc Godard realizes, at the age of eighty-three, an ideal that he has pursued for forty years: sketchlike images, made casually and spontaneously, that are endowed with the power and the grandeur of studio-era cinematography…His 3-D technique is the first advance in deep-focus camerawork since the heyday of Orson Welles; it lends the settings a sumptuous intimacy as it restores the astonishment of sheer perception to the art of the cinema.”
– Richard Brody

“GENUINELY REVELATORY!”
– Time Out

“Exhibits the formal and philosophical mischief that has been [Godard’s] late-career calling card. It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures…the everyday world is made vivid and strange, rendered in a series of sketches and compositions by an artist with an eccentric and unerring eye.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“A thrilling cinematic experience that nearly levitated the theater.”
– Manohla Dargis

“TEASING AND EXHILARATING! Finds [Godard] in an unusually playful, if also contemplative, mood.”
– Village Voice

“The oblique beauty of Goodbye to Language, shot in 3-D, has a tractor-beam-like pull…Running throughout is footage of a dog, Roxy…blissfully free of the tyranny of signifiers and the technology that would undo them. It’s a beautiful gambit: Godard takes the basest form of the modern moving image (the online dog/cat video) and turns it into an expression of profound longing.”
– Bilge Ebiri

“UNQUESTIONABLY A MILESTONE!”
– A.V. Club