Rivette would go on to make fuller-bodied novel-to-screen transpositions, but Out 1, occasionally tedious but in the main totally entrancing, turns out to be the adaptation to end all adaptations, a sort-of Balzacian narrative about the charmed quality of texts themselves. Taking a good long look at various group dynamics, the film lays bare the way that what we read changes, often arbitrarily and often not, the way we read each other.
Benjamin Mercer
November 4, 2015