Recensioni di Metacritic

Elles is racy and often sexy, but underneath that simmers an old-school feminist anger.

Another bravura performance from Juliette Binoche glosses over the flaws in a soft-focused glimpse at the seamier side of student life.

Binoche is, as always, superb, but Malgorzata Szumowska's film won't tell you much about the oldest profession that you didn't already know – and Binoche's marital clashes feel like a standard feminist tract circa 1975.

Titillation and tentative stabs at gender studies do not a cogent cri de coeur make. It's simply a provocation that's all hopped up with nowhere to go.

It's tempting to call Elles some kind of thinking-person's sex movie, but it's more about thinking and about sex (and thinking about sex) and is far more likely to encourage awkward, emphatic conversation than post-show friskiness.

The film is ultimately draining because of the way it handles Anne, stranding a potentially dynamic character in two dueling scenarios, both of which are drab and unsurprising.

Szumowska provides lurid scenes of perverted sex, but she offers no new insight into the sordid world of prostitution and the dangers sex workers face. Nor does she flesh out Charlotte and Alicja. The result is a superficial and voyeuristic film.

Binoche rises above the lubricious material by giving a thoroughly detailed and committed performance as the journalist.

A typically smart performance by Juliette Binoche isn't enough to keep Elles from drowning in pseudo-intellectual pretension and general banality.

It's entirely too much for co-writer/director Malgoska Szumowska to coherently flesh out in an hour and a half, especially with so much time dedicated just to the state of arousal.