The silence of Jeanne Dielman is the film’s weather and its atmosphere. It is a silence of terrible loneliness, and a silence in which a storm is gathering.

It also demands to be seen on the big screen, where the walls and ceiling of the cinema become the confines of Dielman’s domiciliary rituals...

A portrait of female marginalization, subjugation, and suffering that’s as strikingly empathetic and relevant today as it was in 1975.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by a 24-year-old Chantal Akerman, is a masterpiece of minutiae, motherhood and misery.