“Only the title of Jean-Luc Godard’s new film is casual and innocent; ‘Weekend’ is the most powerful mystical movie since ‘The Seventh Seal’ and ‘Fires on the Plain’ and passages of Kurosawa. We are hardly aware of the magnitude of the author-director’s conception until after we are caught up in the comedy of horror, which keeps going further and becoming more nearly inescapable, like ‘Journey to the End of the Night.’

When Godard is viciously funny, he’s on top of things, and he scores and scores, and illuminates as he scores. When he becomes didactic, we can see that he really doesn’t know anymore about what should be done than the rest of us. The more ‘direct’ Godard is, the more fuzzy and obscure he is. Who can assimilate and evaluate this chunk of theory thrown at us in the middle of a movie? Probably most of us blank out on it.

[W]hen it comes to Godard you can only follow and be destroyed. Other filmmakers see the rashness and speed and flamboyance of his complexity; they’re conscious of it all the time, and they love it, and of course, they’re right to love it. But they can’t walk behind him. They’ve got to find other ways, because he’s burned up the ground.” — Going Steady (1970)