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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Innocence

EMAILPRINTLeisure Time Features / Home Vision Entertainment

Innocence reviews
78
5.3 User Score:

Generally favorable reviews

Based on 13 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 8 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Drama  |  Foreign  |  Mystery

Written by: Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Directed by: Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Release Date:
Theatrical: October 21, 2005

Running Time: 117 minutes, Color

Origin: Belgium / France / UK

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

Starring Zoé Auclair, Laisson Lalieux, Astrid Homme, Lea Bridarolli, Ana Palomo-Diaz, Bérangère Haubruge, Olga Peytavi-Müller, Marion Cotillard, and Hélène de Fougerolles

In this cryptic story, a group of young girls are sequestered in a woodsy community where they are trained for ambiguous future roles.

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

TV Guide Ken Fox

Hadzihalilovic succeeds brilliantly at crafting a meaningful enigma that somehow grasps the essence of adolescence, but only grows more mysterious with each revelation.

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100

New York Post V.A. Musetto

One of the oddest, most perplexing -- and delightful -- films to come along this year. And last year, too.

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100

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Confronts the line between the celebration and the exploitation of innocence with an uneasy tension that is discomforting at best.

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90

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Innocence is not merely the year's best first film, but one of the great statements on the politics of being 'tween.

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80

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

This is the weirdest film I've seen all year, or at least the weirdest good film. It's also among the most powerful.

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80

Variety Dennis Harvey

This genuine curio maintains its mystery to the end.

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80

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.

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75

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

A visually lush and eerily enigmatic parable of female sexuality, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's ominous fairy tale raises questions you'll be wondering about for days.

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75

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

An unashamed art picture, the kind of film where extreme aestheticism mixes with nightmare dread, where the story resembles a bad dream and where Freudian symbols cluster around the events like a swarm of insects. It's a very pretty film, but it's also lean, enigmatic and so obscure.

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70

Chicago Reader Ronnie Scheib

Hadzihalilovic, the wife of cinematic agent provocateur Gaspar Noé and his sometime collaborator, has created a work of limpid beauty and eerie menace that some undoubtedly will dismiss as kiddie porn.

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70

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

The Oxford English Dictionary says that an allegory is "an extended or continued metaphor." And to think that this definition was coined when a French film called Innocence was still very far in the future! But how aptly this film proves the point.

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70

The Hollywood Reporter Sura Wood

Sustains a pervasive feeling of anxiety and suspense, despite an absence of dramatic conflict or resolution.

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50

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

The more overtly allegorical Innocence becomes, the duller it gets.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 5.3 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

S W. gave it a10:
The whole film is a very clever metaphor for coming of age.

[Anonymous] gave it a0:
This was a complete waste of time. I can't imagine anyone would enjoy this fecal matter dressed up in a tutu unless they were pedophiles and simply enjoyed watching exploitation of children. There is no point to this movie, and I've seen deeper meaning in the splatter of vomit on a bar floor. At least that can be interpreted as modern abstract expressionist art like a Jackson Pollock. If there exists such a place as this French boarding school, then it should be raided by Interpol to combat human trafficking.

Ash K gave it a1:
Don't watch this film. It's 2 hours of your life that you'll never get back. Through the whole film I kept expecting something to happen and absolutly NOTHING does. What a waste of time!

Joanne C. gave it a5:
Esthetically beautiful, mysterious, dark, strangely attractive, full of symbolism and poetry, this is also one of the most disappointing movies I have ever seen in my life: a beautiful empty and hollow shell.

nathan g. gave it a10:
Outstanding film, full of insight into the nature of female boarding schools and their existance as a mechanism for sustaining and instilling class and gender distinctions in modern society, beautifully and powerfully shot, this is an enlightening film!

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