Metacritic reviews

In Godard’s “King Lear,” a single phrase, a single word, gives rise to an astonishing outpouring of visual investigation and invention.

It may drive you nuts, but it’s probably the most inventive and original Godard film since Passion.

If Godard's use of sound is as inventive as it was in his Dolby "Detective" of 1985, that's reason alone to check it out. [08 Apr 1988, p.B]

[Godard's] rehash of ''King Lear'' is peculiar, but it's also that rare thing in the movie world: a genuine original. [22 Jan 1988, p.22]

The most depressing thing about this Godard work is that it seems so tired, familiar and out of date. The movie's 1960's-ish worship of film as an end in itself, which was a mark of so many earlier, more ebullient Godard movies, now is lifeless.

Another of [Godard's] essays on the impossiblity of making movies in our time, this has all the dreariness of a pathologist's dictated notes.

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's very loose adaptation of "King Lear" is like finding yourself in the middle of a poem whose meaning the poet refuses to make clear.

William Shakespeare would need a sense of humor to view Jean-Luc Godard's "King Lear" without getting steamed up in his bodkins.

Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” is his most off-putting picture since his unwatchable political films of the ‘70s.

While it would be foolish to expect a completely faithful Shakespeare adaptation from Godard, there is no pleasure in being fooled into thinking that this vague, obscure, annoying, cacophonous wreck of a film is anything but a joke being played by a self-indulgent filmmaker.