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Aug 17, 2012100The actors in Compliance perform with thorough and chilling sincerity.
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91With a slow, relentless buildup focused on sexual humiliation, Compliance intensifies the "requests" put on Sandra, and eventually other employees, to behave immorally in the name of cooperation.
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90It makes you think. And that's invaluable.
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Aug 23, 201290With its harrowing restraint, Compliance is potent filmmaking that's not easily forgotten.
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90Compliance is a small movie, but it provides insight into large and frightening events, like the voluntary participation of civilians in the terrible crimes of the last century.
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90A slow-motion punch to the groin. As such, it's fitting that one of our first sights is a large "NO" stenciled in the parking lot of a fast-food joint in suburban Ohio: as the film progresses, the word becomes a silent mantra for viewers who can't quite believe what they're seeing.
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88Zobel's unsparing approach is justified. This film should be hard to watch - and it is. But it's also hard to forget.
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88A taut, understated minimalist masterwork.
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88The truth can indeed be stranger than fiction and, in this case, were the story to have originated in the imagination of the screenwriter, it could rightfully be criticized as artificial and contrived. But, disturbing and unlikely as it may be, this stuff actually happened, and pretty much as Craig Zobel relates it.
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83Compliance is as much a meta-textual gauntlet as it is a movie; its subject matter not only deserves, but demands to be discussed and argued about, rather than being simply accepted at face value.
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83The subject matter is unrelentingly sordid yet the storytelling is so deadpan and understated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss it as exploitation or sexist provocation.
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80If this riveting, repelling film is to be seen, it must be not at home but in a theater, where you are confined in a room, like Sandra and Becky, deciding whether to watch, and how you would react.
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80Compliance examines, among other things, how misplaced faith in authority can lead to abuse on a systemic scale. It's a deeply moral movie about the failure of morality, as grueling to watch as it is necessary.
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80You can't believe what you're watching: Compliance, true to its title, digs into the rarely explored subject of psychological acquiescence (behavioral scientist Stanley Milgram should get a cowriting credit), with common-sense dignity being the first casualty.
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Jul 13, 201280Likely to spur discussions about workplace safety, employee rights and broader awareness of sexual predation, Compliance is also a suspenseful psychological drama for viewers prepared to tolerate its extremes.
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80In taut, gripping and deeply disturbing fashion, writer-director Craig Zobel measures the depths to which rational individuals will sink to obey a self-anointed authority figure in Compliance.
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78It's a small gem of a movie, disturbingly realistic and profoundly terrifying on a near-primal level.
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75Zobel isn't a sadist about all of this as, say, Roman Polanski or David Lynch or Todd Solondz might have been. There's a humanity here, even for the restaurant manager. But that still doesn't make Compliance easy to ingest.
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75The very antonym of "fun," writer-director Craig Zobel's new film Compliance is one of the toughest sits of the movie year 2012. But it's an uncompromising and, in its way, honorable drama built upon a prank call that goes on and on.
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75This is a well-made film, with plausible performances by all the leads, especially Ann Dowd.
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75Some films are harder to watch than others - not because they're bad, which makes for a different sort of painful viewing, but because they touch on areas of such profound moral discomfort that the mere act of watching makes us feel complicit. We feel like gutless witnesses to a crime. And that's what makes Compliance such a hard thing to stomach.
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75Craig Zobel's potent and provocative Compliance is torture to sit through. It's also indispensable filmmaking. How is that possible? Check it out.
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75It's a movie that must be seen, processed and discussed, perhaps the first of its kind to transform the audience into a focus group.
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Aug 2, 201275Compliance develops an intriguing premise intelligently, inquisitively and uncomfortably.
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Aug 14, 201270Compliance lets neither men nor women off the hook.
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70The audience for this movie will have to be an adventurous one, and even then a substantial portion will be outraged by what they see.
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60Director Craig Zobel's indie, based on real cases, has a sharp psychological point and a can't-look-away quality even as it turns horrifically dark.
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50Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.
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25The movie even fails on a psychological level, never illustrating how, in a pressure-cooker environment and swept up by mob-think mentality, we are capable of committing acts that innately repel us.
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12People do stupid things all the time. My friend and I sat through Compliance, didn't we? But there is a level of stupidity displayed by the people in this movie that beggars belief. Their behavior is to stupidity as the Death Star is to a doughnut.
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12It seems as if Craig Zobel wants to implicate the audience in these proceedings, but he doesn't have a very clear idea how to go about it.
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0This nasty little bottom-feeder of a film is too condescending to be trusted, too manipulative to be believed, too turgid to be enjoyed, too shameless to be endured and, before and after everything else, too inept to make its misanthropic case.