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SummaryFrom the director who scandalized France with "Secret Things" comes a film that will shock you, make you think and turn you on. (IFC First Take)

The Exterminating Angels

Metascore
54
User score
Mixed or Average
4.5
My Score
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Metascore
54
38% Positive
6 Reviews
56% Mixed
9 Reviews
6% Negative
1 Review
  • All Reviews
  • Positive Reviews
  • Mixed Reviews
  • Negative Reviews
75
The A.V. Club
The problem with Exterminating Angels is that its explanatory side overwhelms its playfully perverse side.
70
Variety
Brisseau trains his deft camera on the crescendo of female sexual pleasure and how women can heighten the intensity of already blissful sensations via transgressive flourishes. If exiting viewers could all be asked "Was it good for you?" the likely answer is "Yes."
63
Chicago Tribune
The content may be dubious, but the execution is hypnotic.
50
Chicago Reader
Unbelievably pretentious and a bit of a hoot but rarely boring.
50
Boston Globe
Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.
50
New York Post
Brisseau obviously aims to shock - and he does. Now shocking is A-OK with me - but only if it's part of a something bigger. Exterminating Angels is beautifully lensed and acted, but it lacks substance.
30
New York Magazine (Vulture)
Exterminating Angels is meant as an autocritique--and yet the director can't get past his notion of himself as a fearlessly transgressive artist-hero, a martyr to the limitations of male gaze.
See All 16 Critic Reviews
User score
Mixed or Average
4.5
25% Positive
1 Rating
25% Mixed
1 Rating
50% Negative
2 Ratings
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  • Positive Reviews
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Dec 30, 2022
10
Biggun
Film étrange et envoutant qui a un coté fantastique. Il y a pas mal de nudité explicite dans le film ça donne un piment intéressant. Les actrices sont jolies sexy et chaudes.
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Oct 27, 2026
5
MartinOaks
Exterminating my interest François is a film director who seems determined to pursue a pretentious film project that springs up unbidden, and with which he becomes obsessed from the start: he wants to make a film about female orgasms, the "reality" surrounding them, and the transgression of showing them uncensored. To this end, he's decided to avoid hiring porn stars, because they can easily fake any sexual climax. So he begins conducting interviews and castings with "real" actresses who, as screen tests, must demonstrate what they're capable of and how "natural" they can be in the final shoot. Exposed to nudity and their own intimacy, the twenty-somethings reveal, session after session, a vulnerability that, little by little, turns against François, oblivious to his own surroundings and focused exclusively on finding his perfect muses. Meanwhile, signs and mysterious apparitions accumulate around him, describing the effort Heaven is investing in his destruction. His own wife, the exterminating angels, and the strange cryptic messages (actual messages sent by radio to the French Resistance during World War II) are a dire premonition of his fate. It seems that Jean-Claude Brisseau has done his best to imitate the master Cocteau in his use of devices that confront an undeclared war of the sexes. Here, he used an elegant combination of light and shadow for the lesbian and female **** scenes, and this same aesthetic pattern served him well in filming, two years later, "A l'Aventure (2008)," an absurd erotic drama in which women once again become an object of the viewer's desire, and little more.
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Production Company:
  • TS Productions
  • La Sorcière Rouge
  • Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC)
  • CinéCinéma
  • Soficinéma 2
Release Date:Mar 7, 2007
Duration:1 h 40 m

Awards

Cannes Film Festival
• 2 Nominations
Women Film Critics Circle Awards
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
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