The Image Book

The Image Book is worth seeing if only as an aesthetic experience – to let its images and sounds wash over you – while also offering itself up as an object to reflect on.

Coherence was hard to establish but the memory prompts, the lurid colourization and off-beat editing held the attention.

If this turns out to be his final statement (he’s 87), it’s an appropriately ragged one, half-formed but gesturing toward meaning. Every edge bleeds.

Make no mistake: This is an angry movie, both in form and in content.

Caveats aside, this is, in my estimation, a typically stimulating but opaque and deliberately frustrating late-period Godard film, good but not great, distinguished primarily by the fact that it's the first Godard film to use no actors at all.

This could well be the old-man-yells-at-cloud meme in avant-garde cinematic form. Yet amid countless examples of pessimism both verbal and visual, Le Livre D’Image also occasionally ventures into hopefulness.

Everything seems designed to disturb or perhaps infuriate the viewer.

Incoherent, incomprehensible, intolerable dribble by a senile old master French fraud, this might be his ultimate sham. Not only does the less than novice image look atrocious (and we are to believe this is a great artist of cinema?!), but by today's standards you get better conceptual thought and commentary not to mention visual adeptness on the vast amateur junkyard known as YouTube. Free. Anyone liking or making excuses for this ---- is likely as phony and pretentious as the pompous idiots in the jackass critics herd. If there is some brilliant latent conceptual art premise here requiring discovery, it's so hidden as to be pointless and certainly not worth the trouble nor any good will.