Metacritic reviews

Compact, ultra-explicit two-character pic about what transpires when a beautiful straight woman hires a handsome gay man to "look" at her is gloriously mannered, proudly pretentious and undeniably compelling.

Anatomy of Hell gives a feminist twist to a French literary tradition that goes back to the Marquis de Sade. It's also svelte, assured filmmaking.

What follows is graphic, but it's too cerebral and too challenging to be dismissed as pornography.

If you're feeling open-minded and a little adventurous, this chilling exploration of the gender gap from Gallic bad-girl Catherine Breillat is worth a look.

The award for hardest-to-watch movie of the year.

Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.

Breillat is a smart, serious observer of sexuality's often disruptive role in human life, but this existential drama is sadly pretentious.

Ranks high on the squirm meter. But, unlike in most of her earlier work, there's no emotional payoff.

Anatomy of Hell offers one of the most hateful and mechanical representations of sexuality I've ever seen.

Anatomy of Hell is more than a lapse; it is a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker who, having stripped down to the nitty-gritty once too often, may finally have nothing left to show.