Louis Malle's Black Moon perplexed most critics and proved equally baffling for audiences at commercial theaters in France and in this country. Newsweek's Jack Kroll focused in pretty well on what Black Moon accomplishes: “The characters in Louis Malle's Black Moon speak a number of languages, including jabberwocky, in a futuristic France where language and culture have exploded in a war between (what else?) men and women. The only life and color left is in the visionary world of Lily, a young girl who escapes the intersexual slaughter by fleeing to a mysterious country house inhabited by a bedridden old Teutonic lady, a grimly beautiful brother and sister, a unicorn and a small army of naked children who herd pigs. Boobytrapped with grenades of whimsy, the film never blows up because of the intense sincerity of this highly personal work. Malle creates, with the help of the stunning child-woman Cathryn Harrison (Rex's granddaughter), the pungent Thérèse Giehse...and the marvelous cinematography of Sven Nykvist, an apocalyptic ‘Alice In Wonderland' in which innocence and perversity find a common hideout in a world of dull-eyed executioners who have neither.”