The films of the Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) emphasize the hypocrisy of conventional morality.Luis Buñuel was born in Calanda, the first of seven children in a prosperous, l...
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Critical Essay by Henry Miller
Buñuel is obsessed by the cruelty, ignorance and superstition which prevail among men. He realizes that there is no hope for man anywhere on this earth unless a ...
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Critical Essay by Lita Paniagua
Patterned loosely after the picaro novels of the Spanish Renaissance, The Milky Way follows two itinerants, amiable, friendly fellows…. [They] participate as sp...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
[The Milky Way is a] parable of Christianity, but it is free of Christ parallels (Nazarin), of sterile and protracted allegory (The Exterminating Angel), of shallo...
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Critical Essay by Carlos Fuentes
An obsessive artist, Buñuel cares about what he wants to say; or rather, what he wants to see. A really important director makes only one film; his work is a s...
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Critical Essay by Tony Richardson
Surrealism is born out of despair; its only power is to hasten the general cataclysm by its own prophetic chaos. Max Ernst said of it, "In turning topsy-turvy...
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Critical Essay by Peter P. Schillaci
Through forty years of filmmaking, Luis Bunuel has been opening our eyes to see what might otherwise evade our notice. And he is not averse to using a razor slash...
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Critical Essay by Peter Harcourt
Luis Buñuel … is first and foremost a Spaniard and after that a surrealist. His view of life has developed from this primary fact. His inheritance has b...
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Critical Essay by Raymond Durgnat
If the inexplicable abounds in Buñuel's work, it is so that his moral arguments are constantly related to the inner world of desires and feelings, rela...
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Critical Essay by Don Willis
The archetypal heroes of the comic, or serio-comic, films of Luis Buñuel such as El (1952), Nazarin (1958) and Simon of the Desert (1965) are pure, in either sense...
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Critical Essay by AndrÉ Breton
The day will soon come when we realise that, in spite of the wear and tear of life that bites like acid into our flesh, the very cornerstone of that violent libe...
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Critical Essay by Lindsay Anderson
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a film by an artist of fresh, still developing talent, a poetic film, with a purity of style that marks it as the statement of ...
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Critical Essay by Basil Wright
[The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz] is in many respects a very remarkable film. It is a comédie noire in which the director may have taken himself more ...
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Critical Essay by Geoffrey Nowell-smith
At first sight (and with hindsight too, as the films have reached us in the wrong order), Nazarin … looks simply like a more ambiguous version of Viridi...
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Luis Buñuel
Critical Essay by Henry Miller
