PlayTime

The most visually inventive film of the Sixties is also one of the funniest. For this remarkable 1967 comedy about man and his modern world, Jacques Tati attempted nothing less than a complete reworking of the conventional notions of montage, and, amazingly, he succeeded. Instead of cutting within scenes, Tati creates comic tableaux of such detail that, as film scholar Noël Burch has said, the film has to be seen not only several times, but from several different points in the theater to be appreciated fully. Within the film's three large movements, Tati's Monsieur Hulot goes from fear of his ultramodern, glass-towered environment to a poetic transcendence of it. A masterpiece among masterpieces, and certainly the last word on Mies van der Rohe.
(Dave Kehr)