"I adore Jean-Luc Godard’s early films. Stylish, contemporary, and innovative, this is one of his best—and Brigitte Bardot, well!"

"In the anthropology of my mind, the idea of a movie star can be traced back to James Dean and Brigitte Bardot. If Bardot is always doing Bardot, then this film is the best of her. Her wild, feral sexiness, culminating in that final dance scene—by that point I'm dizzy from her."

"Brigitte Bardot has never been better. The way Jack Palance’s producer brilliantly humiliates Michel Piccoli’s writer, who tries to hold on to his pride, rings a bell. Plus, our friend Fritz Lang as the director . . . Sacré Jean-Luc!"

"I saw this movie as an adolescent in the late fifties, at the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades, and it made me feel strange things I’d never felt before . . . I also thought that Brigitte Bardot was the number-one sex kitten on earth."

"No one today is as modern as Godard. There has never been a more daring conceptual, chic, and irreverent filmmaker. In Contempt it is not posturing but a fascinating portrait of a marriage unraveling. Funny, chic, beautiful Brigitte Bardot (for god’s sake) and haunting."

"A visual and aural feast. The best movie ever made about moviemaking. Greece and Brigitte Bardot provide the purest form of seduction; Jack Palance provides the sleaziest. The subtext that explains the title is sexual politics at its most provocative. Every frame of this movie is invigorating. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard and composer Georges Delerue deserve to be canonized. The already anointed Fritz Lang, playing himself, gives the film yet another pleasurable dimension of film truth."

"I used to think of Godard and Antonioni as the great modern visual artists of cinema—great colorists who composed frames the way painters composed their canvases. I still think so, but I also connect with them on the emotional level. And for me, Contempt is one of the most moving films of its era. At the time, people talked a lot about the unlikely combination of artists involved: a multilingual Carlo Ponti production of an Alberto Moravia novel, starring Brigitte Bardot, costarring Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance, set at Cinecittà and in the Casa Malaparte in Capri, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, with Fritz Lang as himself. The film itself got a little lost in the fixation on the details. It’s interesting when circumstances that seem so relevant and important at the time of a film’s release just dissolve as the years go by. I didn’t care so much about all of that background information at the time, I just responded to what I saw on the screen, but over the years Contempt has grown increasingly, almost unbearably, moving to me. It’s a shattering portrait of a marriage going wrong, and it cuts very deep, especially during the lengthy and justifiably famous scene between Piccoli and Bardot in their apartment: even if you don’t know that Godard’s own marriage to Anna Karina was coming apart at the time, you can feel it in the action, the movement of the scenes, the interactions that stretch out so painfully but majestically, like a piece of tragic music. Contempt is also a lament for a kind of cinema that was disappearing at the time, embodied by Fritz Lang and the impossible adaptation of The Odyssey that he’s directing. And it is a profound cinematic encounter with eternity, in which both the lost marriage and the cinema seem to dissolve. It’s one of the most frightening great films ever made."