text: Because of the film's obscurity, various sources list its running time as anywhere from 86 to 93 minutes. Cinelicious Pics clarified in May 2016 that its 86-minute restoration represented the correct running time, saying that this length had been cut down by approximately eight minutes for an unsuccessful re-release in Japan in 1979 (with the addition of the brief ending shot of Eugène Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People, which was not in the original version, but Cinelicious left it in the restored version). Cinelicious restored the censored footage from the sole surviving 35 mm release print of the full-length version at the Cinematek in Belgium, which agreed to do a 4K scan of the missing sections from their print. It has received generally favorable reviews from contemporary film critics.
  Discotek Media picked up the license to the film in 2023 and they released the film on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on May 28, 2024.
  Reception
  Belladonna of Sadness holds a 90% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 41 reviews, with an average rating of 7.80/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Belladonna of Sadness has more than enough brilliant visual artistry to keep audiences enraptured even as the film's narrative reach slightly exceeds its grasp". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100 based on 12 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
  In 2016, Charles Solomon of the Los Angeles Times reviewed the film, calling it dated by today's standards and saying that it "looks exploitative and misogynistic 43 years later".