Cast of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Delphine Seyrig Jeanne Dielman Jan Decorte Sylvain Dielman Jacques Doniol-Valcroze 2nd Caller Chantal Akerman Neighbor (voice) (uncredited)
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Reviews
ReelViews James Berardinelli
Clocking in at 202 minutes, the movie would be difficult enough to sit through if it was chock-full of suspense, action, and thrills. It contains none of those three elements. Filmspotting Adam Kempenaar
It's astonishing Chantal Akerman was only 25 when she made this ... Movies are all too often reserved for stories of grand sacrifices - typically, male ones; Jeanne Dielman grants epic status to the everyday sacrifices of women. Village Voice Andrew Sarris
I respect Jeanne Dielman as a whole and even admire parts of it, but I do not feel that it breaks out of its formal shell into the realm of exquisite feeling that I have found over the years in the great works of Bresson, Godard, and Fassbinder. We become so familiar with Jeanne's daily routine that, as the movie goes on, even minor variations in what she does register as dramatic events, and major diversions feel like earthquakes... Los Angeles Times Justin Chang
Monumental ... Film Comment Magazine Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson
[Akerman, Seyrig, and Mangolte] are seemingly in perfect accord as to what they want to say about a tradition-bound treadmill whose back-forth, up-down existence is the phenomenological stuff of this movie, what other movies leave out. At once spectacle and antispectacle, Jeanne Dielman not only criticizes the dominant mode of representing women but challenges the dominant mode of representation itself. New York Magazine/Vulture David Denby
There's subversive black humor and violence lurking in Jeanne Dielman's implacable calm. New York Daily News Kathleen Carroll
There is something curiously compelling about Ackerman's chillingly documented portrait of an obsessively neat woman who slowly but inevitably cracks under the strain of maintaining her image as a perfect mother and housekeeper. Akerman's chillingly sardonic feminist fable -- which also bears the weight of unspoken wartime trauma -- is built on a sublime paradox, the elusive identity of someone who, as the title suggests, is so easily identified. Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
An enormously demanding, superbly wrought film that also is most rewarding. Crooked Marquee Roxana Hadadi
An unflinching portrait of the mundanity of middle-aged womanhood, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was subversive from the start. Akerman has locked us into Jeanne's world. Slight deviations from Jeanne's routine seem shattering intrusions into the world she has built around herself. Her disintegration, gathering force, expresses itself through cracks in those routines. Boston Phoenix David Edelstein
The rigid structure is meant to echo the character's neuroses, but the
woman is such a voidoid and her universe is so constricted that Akerman's accomplishment feels minimal: the film is a miniature
bloated to 196 minutes. Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The protracted scenes of eating, cooking and cleaning carry neo-realism to its end point and to a violent climax which emerges logically and terrifyingly from the welter of daily trivia preceding it. Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Jeanne Dielman is not for all tastes. But for those with the necessary patience, it is a game-changing masterpiece. Chantal Akerman's radical 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns the term "realism" on its face, exploring the contours of a woman's life through the mundane routines that never make it into movies. Los Angeles Times Sam Adams
The reward is a new sense of connection to actions that normally pass without thought, a sense that every flip of a light switch is an experience to be savored for its pure physical sensation, a step in a dance that never ends. The Daily Beast Nick Schager
A portrait of female marginalization, subjugation, and suffering that's as strikingly empathetic and relevant today as it was in 1975. Chicago Reader Kathleen Sachs
It also demands to be seen on the big screen, where the walls and ceiling of the cinema become the confines of Dielman's domiciliary rituals...
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