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Innocence
EMAILPRINTLeisure Time Features / Home Vision Entertainment

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 13 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 8 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
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.
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
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...
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.
Read Full Review >New York Post V.A. Musetto
One of the oddest, most perplexing -- and delightful -- films to come along this year. And last year, too.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Sura Wood
Sustains a pervasive feeling of anxiety and suspense, despite an absence of dramatic conflict or resolution.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
The more overtly allegorical Innocence becomes, the duller it gets.
Read Full Review >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!
