Diva

Even after over four decades, Diva still impresses with Beineix’s masterful mix of highbrow and lowbrow. With the stunning new 4K restoration, Diva retains its well-deserved status as a late 20th-century movie masterpiece.

Twenty-five years after its release, "Diva" is still an excellent model on how a crime thriller should be done.

Incredibly stylish and visually ravishing arguably to a fault Jean-Jacques Beineixís audacious debut has aged well.

Diva is an extraordinary thriller and first film from Jean-Jacques Beineix, complex, stylish and fast-moving.

Though it means to be a romantic suspense-thriller, it has the self-consciously enigmatic manner of a high-fashion photograph, the kind that's irresistible to amateur artists who draw mustaches on the perfectly symmetrical faces of pencil-thin models in sables.

It's a rousing movie within its limitations. [13 May 1982, p.18]

What has aged well in Diva is the grave beauty of that aria and the wry, painterly camera shots - you should see the new print for the colors alone - conceived by Beineix but executed by the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. They're enough to tide us over and maybe convince the kids that hip date movies existed back when their parents and dinosaurs roamed the earth.