Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

a must see movie to (re)discover the real sweet and human philosophy of le marquis de sade.the duo auteuil/jacquot builds the simplest and the finest image of should have be the true donatien alphonse françois de sade. DVD bonus provides multiple interesting point of view of the team interviews. direction by benoit jacquot is simple and historically and in context very sharp. It's more than a movie because it makes you understand the enormous paradox between the word "sadic" and one of our gentle , humanist , coherent , true, realist philosopher we ever had .

i finally got the chance to watch this flick and it was OK. the story is fine and some interesting moments.but the performances were so weak and Boring. they all looked like they were asleep, especially the actor actor who played the marquise.he didn't show emotion and he doesn't have the charisma and personality to play Sade.Geoffreys performance in Quills may have been a little inaccurate but it still was much better and entertaining.not only Geoffrey was better also Kate Winslet as The Marquie's muse.another problem in this movie well there is not a memorable villain like Michael Caine

Only one thing hampered my total enjoyment of this film: Isild le Besco, with her Asian looks, cannot possibly be the child of Jean-Pierre Cassel and Dominique Reymond. Otherwise this is far better than Kaufman's Quills as a portrait of Sade. Daniel Auteuil is always at home in costume parts (remember him as the doomed officer in The Widow of St. Pierre?) and his ease with the part is wonderful. This is a more thoughtful, more world-weary debauched aristocrat than the caricature that Geoffrey Rush gave us. My favorite scene: dinner at the prison, Sade musing about Robespierre's belief in a supreme being--would that be solid, or a gas perhaps?--as he courts Emilie, under the watchful eyes of her parents.Benoit Jacquot has made a film that is more accessible than some he has done. There is a Bressonian austerity to some of his past films that this one thankfully lacks. The Marquis had the ability to appeal to your love of liberty and hatred for tyranny, at the same time as making you appalled when you sit down to read his novels. Jacquot knows this and plays down the writing.

Daniel Auteuil makes an excellent Marquis de Sade (even better than Geoffrey Rush in Quills) in this intelligent film by one of France's very best directors, Benoit Jacquot (The School of Flesh, Pas De Scandale). Unlike the aforementioned Philip Kaufman picture, which examined the issue of censorship by using Sade and his work as a backdrop, this film intends to explore the sides of the infamous pornographer as philanthropist. While being held prisoner in a grand chateau with many other nobles following the French revolution, Sade befriends a curious young woman and teaches her a thing or two about growing up. The relationship they develop is genuine and in the end very moving, mostly because while instructing her to loosen up she teaches him how he can reclaim his emotional self and learn to once again love the society that he has dismissed as conventional and narrow. Not Jacquot's best, but a worthy piece of work.