Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.
Buñuel's late-career peak is a genuinely one-of-a-kind work: its recursive dream-within-dream structure and relentless, deadpan frustration of bourgeois ritual are unlike anything else in cinema. The plot is not a conventional narrative but a brilliantly organized assault on logic and social convention, earning a top mark for its subversive architecture. Acting is solidly ensemble but not individually electrifying — the performers serve the satiric machinery rather than transcending it. Cinematography is competent and purposefully flat, matching the bourgeoisie's own spiritual emptiness, but not visually dazzling. The ending — the sextet simply walking down a road to nowhere — is memorably apt but not wholly satisfying as a resolution, keeping it at above-average rather than exceptional.