In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.
Ratings
Curator score: 9.0/10
IMDb: 7.7/10
Letterboxd: 4.00/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 98%
Metacritic: 93
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Luis Buñuel
Production
Greenwich Film Production
Cast
Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Paul Frankeur, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Julien Bertheau, Claude Piéplu, Michel Piccoli, François Maistre, Pierre Maguelon, Maxence Mailfort, Milena Vukotić, Maria Gabriella Maione, Muni, Georges Douking, Christian Baltauss, Bernard Musson, Jacques Rispal, Robert Le Béal
Curator Review
Verdict
A brilliantly strange anti-bourgeois satire that turns dinner, etiquette, and social performance into an endless comic trap. Its dream logic and deadpan precision make it both accessible as farce and rewarding as political surrealism.
Best for
fans of surreal comedy
viewers who like political satire
people open to nontraditional narrative structure
admirers of deadpan European cinema
fans of dreamlike, puzzle-box films
Skip if
you want a clear plot with conventional payoff
you dislike ambiguity and repetition
you prefer broad, punchline-driven comedy
you need emotionally warm or character-driven storytelling
Overview
Buñuel turns the rituals of class into a machine for humiliation. A dinner that never happens becomes the perfect image for privilege: always performing civility, always deferring reality, always one interruption away from collapse. The comedy is dry, but the target is viciously clear.
Worth noting
What makes the film endure is how freely it moves between the banal and the absurd. Dreams leak into waking life, scenes reset without warning, and the characters keep trying to maintain manners in a world that refuses to cooperate. The result is both funny and unsettling, a satire that feels as if it’s laughing at the very idea of social order.
Bottom line
It’s not a film that explains itself, and that’s part of the pleasure. The structure is loose, the logic is slippery, and the jokes land with a kind of elegant cruelty. If you like your comedy sharpened into a critique of power, this is essential viewing.
Top Letterboxd reviews
nora (4★) · 2846 likes
buñuel could have said "eat the rich" but instead he said "the rich don't eat" because he's a cryptic bitch
(6/10 from 1972)
demi adejuyigbe · 2229 likes
Too dumb to get what’s happening here but it “felt” funny!
maneleeo (4.5★) · 1859 likes
I too hate it when I'm trying to have dinner with my rich buddies and suddenly *shuffles deck, pulls card* the army burst in.
Karsten (4★) · 1682 likes
this is, and i don't say this lightly, bananas
Mike D'Angelo (5★) · 1063 likes
97/100
When I first heard the title, I thought, "Finally! Someone's going to tell the truth about the bourgeoisie!" What a disappointment. It would be hard to imagine a less fair or, or accurate portrait.
Hard to quantify the cumulative satirical force this movie brings to bear, as it maintains the same level of genial drollery from start to finish. I always start out mildly amused, wind up gobsmacked...but it seems entirely possible that shuffling the scenes at random would… more