Diva – Jean-Jacques Beineix

• Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
“EVERYTHING ONCE NEW ABOUT DIVA NOW SEEMS NEW AGAIN !… Beineix’s artistic audacity only becomes clearer: Not for nothing was the new New Wave of French filmmaking he unleashed called the cinéma du look. The movie’s mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another. I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE DIVA 80’s ALL OVER AGAIN!”

• Nathan Lee, The Village Voice
“A BRASH, SNAZZY THRILLER! Conspicuously clever and shamelessly glam, Diva contrived a neo-new-wave sensibility with a post-Pop gloss that came to be known as “cinéma du look,” a Franglais label for the micro-movement of super-stylish, unabashedly romantic pictures made throughout the ’80s by a clique of bright young things including Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax.”

• Benjamin Sutton, The New York Press
“A POSTMODERN CLASSIC! Beineix’s reprinted and retranslated directorial debut LOOKS AND SOUNDS SUPERB, with a hybrid score of pop and opera, bold and colorful costume and set design, and entrancing cinematography…Flows between its romance, drama and thriller plots more smoothly than today’s best genre-blenders.”

• David Edelstein, New York Times
“LIKE SOMETHING BEAMED DOWN FROM THE PLANET OF COOL! Diva seems organic through and through. What could be more natural than the juxtaposition of the industrial and the New Wave?…THIS IS STYLE AS A FORCE OF NATURE.”

• Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
“GENUINELY SPARKLING!… Beineix has a fabulous camera technique and understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself too seriously-the whole high-tech incandescence of the film is played for humor…If Diva is about anything, it’s about the joy of making movies. EVERY SHOT SEEMS DESIGNED TO DELIGHT THE AUDIENCE.”

• David Ansen, Newsweek
- “You have only to watch ten minutes of Diva and you know you are in the hands of a man born to make movies. SENSUAL, FUNNY, OUTLANDISH, THIS IS A MOVIE DEVOTED STRICTLY TO THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE. ”
- “You have only to watch ten minutes of Diva and you know you are in the hands of a man born to make movies.
Sensual, funny, outlandish, this is a movie devoted strictly to the pleasure principle.”

• Michael Sragow, Rolling Stone
“A PIECE OF DIVINE MADNESS, full of comedy romance, opera and murder. Diva is a thriller with a new way of looking at the world – through a glass, brightly.”

• J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
- “Not only the most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year, but surely one of the finest films to arrive from France in a decade.”
- “Diva is not only the most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year,
but surely one of the finest films to arrive from France in a decade.”

• Annette Insdorf
“A dazzling first feature and a breath of fresh air.”

• Jay Scott
“The most impressive debut from a French director since Godard’s Breathless.”