Pickpocket · reception & legacy

How Pickpocket has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Parisian critics were split in 1959 — many found its blank acting and 75-minute austerity baffling — but the New Wave generation championed it, and it's since become the consensus pick for Bresson's masterpiece, a fixture of greatest-films polls.

What's debated

The eternal Bresson fight: is the deliberately affectless 'model' acting transcendent purity or emotionally inert tedium — the film cinephiles most often use to sort the converted from the bored.

Its footprint

Paul Schrader has spent a whole career remaking its final scene — American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and First Reformed all end on the Pickpocket ending — and he routinely names it his favourite film; the closing line about the strange path taken is one of art cinema's most quoted.

Where it stands

A 'you must have seen this' pillar of the arthouse canon — the standard gateway drug into Bresson and a Criterion-shelf badge of seriousness.