The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

Buñuel’s 1972 surreal masterpiece is stranger and more sensual than ever, with its weirdness under the conventions throbbing more insistently now that those conventions are historically distant. The critic singles out the superbly disturbing scene in which a dinner party discovers it is on stage before an audience.

The critic praises Buñuel's brilliant new comedy as free in form yet lucid and wise, a collection of funny and somber thoughts on the French upper middle class by a master moralist, humorist and social critic.

Luis Buñuel adds another fine film to his record with this surrealistically oriented tale of bourgeois types that encompasses politics, the Church, the army and the upper class in a timely and timeless way; the director at 72 remains a youthful filmmaker with impeccable handling of a solid cast.

The critic calls it a mordant masterpiece and Buñuel's most artistically complete film, praising its innovative imagery and games with reality while noting the satire on the bourgeoisie is delivered with humour rather than violence.

The critic finds the film still great due to Buñuel's command of the medium and inventive design, even if its satire feels less sharp in a later era. He highlights the reversal of the premise from The Exterminating Angel and the director's shift to a more playful prankster mode.

The review highlights the film's re-release as one of Buñuel's great late works, praising its formal simplicity, deadpan mise-en-scène, and the way it blends absurdity with a clear sense of situations and relationships while showing the characters' inner lives directly.

The critic describes the film as a deliciously funny but bitter send-up of the entitled, hypocritical upper classes and their thwarted dinner plans, highlighting its cynical take on bourgeois corruption and surreal interruptions.

The critic calls the film a dry vintage, not the director's most lucid critique but still delectable for its wry set pieces and comic fierceness. He singles out the memorable disruptions to the bourgeois characters' dinner attempts and the way the sketches peel back layers of entitlement.

The late-career classic is simultaneously darkly satirical, bleak, witty and lightly amusing as it batters the French class system through snobbish diners endlessly seeking an elusive meal. The critic singles out the withering portrait of status-craving characters who ridicule commoners.

The review calls it an amusing satire on polite society with a tricksy, improvisatory story of aborted meals that retains mischievous energy, though it may have lost some of its original strangeness over time.

The critic finds the film darkly hilarious and pleasurable in its surreal class satire, where a bourgeois group's repeated failed attempts to dine expose their greed, hypocrisy and mediocrity. Buñuel's playful structure and symbolic devices keep viewers engaged while implicating them in the characters' entrapment.

The critic calls it Buñuel’s funniest and most accessible film, a perfect introduction to the director’s work that satirizes the pretensions and entitlement of the upper middle class through interrupted dinners and increasingly surreal dream sequences.

The piece presents the film as an exasperating yet enthralling absurdist class satire and the original 'eat the rich' movie, in which wealthy friends are repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to dine by bizarre events and dreams. It highlights the surrealist masterpiece's appeal as a perfect chaser to modern social satires.