"This existential stalemate about party guests paralyzed by their own sense of politesse reaffirmed how the exile of surrealism had achieved a stylistic serenity by which he advanced from the merely profane to the eminently profound. Buñuel uses black humor as an ironic instrument of liberation for a civilization defrauded of its dreams and living a polite lie. His apparent target here is nineteen social butterflies pinned and suffocated in a caged contrivance of the cinema of the absurd, but the parable about squirming under the pressure of civilized hypocrisies is not pointed at a class or a system or a religion. The Exterminating Angel is a cruel joke for everyone." -Village Voice