Matt Damsker

Those of us who discover this film decades after its release may feel we know all too well what Akerman is doing — and perhaps we do, yet the rigor and rhythm, marked by the character’s footsteps through her ordered domestic world, rival anything by Kubrick or Hitchcock, rejecting all theatricality as no film before it, while Seyrig’s performance is one of the greatest in film history. This is a masterwork of modern art.