Brilliant. No less impressive though the funding fell through during shooting and Bunuel was forced to rewrite the film from a feature to a 45 minute short overnight... it's still a classic. Pinal is beautiful as ever, and hilariously anarchic as the Devil sent to tempt Simon from his pillar in the desert. A real pleasure and a film that deserves a much wider audience.

Awesome movie! Really funny and ironic most of the time, and the ending was amazing. You can analyze it however you want, but you have to admit that what takes place is effective.

I was only familiar with Buñuel's surrealist films, so Simon of the Desert, while an absurdist tragi-comic fable and not a piece of realism, was a nice, more accessible surprise. Buñuel takes the story of a Syrian saint who stood on a column in the desert to show his piety and turns him into a kind of super-Jesus being tempted by Satan, to explore his complicated feelings about Christianity. Through vignettes in the life of Samuel, the film exposes hypocrisies, shows off the absurdity of Jansenism and Biblical literalism, and in its abrupt finale (Buñuel has blamed financial concerns for the film's length, others have said it was originally meant to be part of an anthology that never came to be), shows us why Scripture is inadequate to describe the world, and at the same time, how we're inadequate as interpreters of Scripture. Because that's the thing, as a piece of cinematic blasphemy, it's really very reverent; it's mostly angry at humanity for its false piety. A complex work that I wish were slightly longer.