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80A beautiful period piece, set against one of the world's glorious cities, adding poignancy. Twists and turns heighten a gradually accruing effect, building to a risky moment of truth, a coup de théâtre that is as daring as it is satisfying.
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80The film is high romance, rather like those American movies of the 1940s -- people snatching at happiness in a world aflame. We don't make them anymore -- stupid us --but we ought to be glad someone does.
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78Moments of black comedy break up the melodrama – a newsreel depicts the song's "victims" and a Nazi secretary rages against her Duden grammar manual – but the overall tone is still that of a four-alarm weeper.
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75It's an old-fashioned romantic triangle, told with schmaltzy music on the sound track and a heroine with a smoky singing voice, and then the Nazis turn up and it gets very complicated and heartbreaking.
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75Suicides are proliferating in the city -- is the song to blame, or is it the tenor of the times?
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75The fine cast, the elegant settings and the swoony title song somehow draw you in.
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75Strange, compelling and hard to classify, it's both a romance and a character study, and it's set against a historical backdrop.
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70Long on atmosphere and Old World charm.
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70It's possible that Gloomy Sunday is more "significant" than it is compelling.
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70The iconic '30s song "Gloomy Sunday" gets a distinctive celluloid setting in this well-played, cleverly scripted pic in which music and character are inextricably combined.
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67It's old-fashioned, sometimes accomplished, syrupy and, at its intermittent best, absorbing.
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63Is it possible for an historically -based Holocaust movie to be schmaltzy? This one sure comes close.
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63Lushly engaging, even if it covers some of the same ground as ''The Pianist'' with less artistry and more melodrama.
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60This is a truly strange love story that definitely grew on me as it ran its course, or perhaps it was just that infectious song sinking its hooks into me.
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60Gloomy Sunday's success in transcending its own clichés and conventionality -- at least until the morose finale -- is due in part to the story's primal romantic pull, aided by attractive actors who either stare longingly into each other's eyes or cavort in states of undress.
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60Who knew that one of Billie Holiday's most haunting songs was written in Budapest in the 1930s? I didn't until I saw Gloomy Sunday, a German film, shot in Hungary and directed by Rolf Schubel, that I enjoyed quite a lot, even though it's all over the map in more ways than one.
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60The Holocaust subplot is contrived and schematic. Yet the central love triangle is fairly compelling, aided by Krol's fine performance.
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50Entertaining in spite its dubious accuracy.
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50The story is so schematically histrionic that the bringing in of the Holocaust late in the day feels exploitative and unearned. Gloomy Sunday is an oddity that takes itself much too seriously.
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50It's a piquant story but unfortunately the movie creaks with European-style artifice. It tells its story in a rather cinematically stilted style, and some of the dramatic moments come perilously close to unintentional parody.
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40There's a whiff of exploitation about any movie that claims the Holocaust as a “backdrop,” and Rolf Schübel’s treacly tale of three men lovesick for the same blue-eyed beauty fairly reeks of it.
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40Dissolving four characters' lives into the dank smoke of the bitterest of torch songs, Gloomy Sunday fashions an apocryphal, pretty, and somewhat pat biography of the title ballad.