Claude Chabrol has made about fifty films since 1958, when he was one of the figures in the French New Wave. Most of them involve crime, all of them involve pathological or obsessive behavior, and the number of them worth seeing is impressive. La Cérémonie, he has said, is a Marxist film about class struggle, but perhaps it is more of a Freudian film, about the scarcely repressed sexuality of Jeanne and Sophie, and the ways it is expressed against a family that represents for both of them a hated authority. Watching the film, you think maybe you know where it’s headed. Or maybe not. Not every ceremony ends in the way we anticipate (…). The actors include old hands who have worked with Chabrol before and strike the right note: No one in this movie should act as if he knows how it ends. And no one does. – Roger Ebert, 1997.