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91After a somewhat shaky start, the film gradually settles in to become another extraordinarily powerful and explosively acted drama that deftly probes the moral responsibility of an artist in a totalitarian society.
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88A rarity -- an intelligent and moving drama of ideas that becomes increasingly thrilling as the ideas unfold.
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88Proves acutely subtle. But its question of what we forgive art in the face of atrocity and immorality is one for the ages.
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80In compelling, suspenseful fashion, Taking Sides illuminates brilliantly the dilemma of a great, world-renowned artist flourishing in a totalitarian regime.
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80Sparked by the actors' powerful performances, Arnold's moral absolutism and Furtwängler's lofty aestheticism make for a dramatically compelling clash.
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75The movie is both interesting and unsatisfying. The Keitel performance is over the top, inviting us to side with Furtwangler simply because his interrogator is so vile.
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75Ronald Harwood's screenplay, based on his stage play, brings an impressive range of moral and political issues into play. The acting is also strong.
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75This is courtroom drama at is best, especially when you listen to the sublime soundtrack.
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75Compelling and superbly acted.
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70Stellan Skarsgård's deceptively low-key performance as the beleaguered musician -- furtive, indignant, drowning in self-pity blended with a kind of ruined nobility -- pushes the emotional temperature to a quiet fever pitch.
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70Its soul rests in Skarsgard's performance, a powerful mixture of buttoned-down anger and personal disappointment that combines the filmmaker's self-questioning with the real-life character's conflict.
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70The deep drawback of Taking Sides is that it forgets to be interested in music. [8 September 2003, p. 100]
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70This dialectical drama has plenty of creaky moments, but Harvey Keitel compensates with a canny, surprising performance.
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63Characters do little more than run around the same track incessantly, leaving us waiting for revelations that never arrive.
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63A compelling look at a vexa tious question, Taking Sides is, at times, hamstrung by its own ambiguity.
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60Powerful, personal, but bombastic.
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60Taking Sides has a padded-out, stagebound quality that is anything but lyrical. And Szabó, a Hungarian best known for "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is not at his best here.
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60Flawed but fascinating.
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50Boy, can Harvey Keitel be bad -- and not bad like "Bad Lieutenant," bad like bad acting.
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50The idea for the film is engaging and interesting, but the result is bland.
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50Be sure to stay for the coda, a damning piece of newsreel that casts much of what went before in a whole new light.
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50Taking Sides is really no less simplistic than "Sunshine," but its predecessor succeeded because of its length and scope. Taking Sides stays rooted in one place and one discussion, and never gets anywhere.
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50We can almost hear the way he (Keitel) will speak a line before he speaks it. The triteness of the role and its performance, instead of dramatizing the contrast between this philistine and the artist, makes the confrontation between the two men a smug setup.
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42The sides to consider in Taking Sides are all but obscured by cinematic pomposity at best, Holocaust porn at worst.
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30The notions of the good man's complicity through inertia and of innocence tarnished by association are ones that have been more powerfully explored before.
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25The movie's promise -- to provide a balanced argument -- goes unrealized, and all we're left with is the spectacle of an idiot bullying a genius.
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