[Perceval is] a visually delirious, aurally seductive, tutorally exposed, exactly performed film version of Chretien de Troyes' romance….

Perceval certainly is not a movie like Ivanhoe, or The Seventh Seal, or Lancelot du Lac. It's a shut-up-tight-indoors experience, so contoured and so dazzling it amounts to a venereal assault. It's exigent ecstatic fabulism. Unhappily, it is a masterpiece to which subtitling is almost ruinous. (p. 57)

If "perfect of its kind" needs explanation, or if the question that can never be unanswered nevertheless still pleases as much as ever it may torment, Perceval will illustrate and will seduce. (p. 58)

James McCourt, "Percival and Other Knights" (copyright © 1978 by James McCourt; reprinted by permission of the author), in Film Comment, Vol. 14, No. 6, November-December, 1978, pp. 57-65.