| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
This is a Holocaust movie that is so relentlessly observed and so aware of woe that it never feels like it belongs to a genre.
|
| 100 |
TV Guide
This exceptional film features some of the most beautiful cinematography ever seen on film, in service of some of the most horrible images imaginable.
|
| 100 |
New York Post
Kyle Smith
Profound and majestic.
|
| 100 |
Salon.com
One of the greatest of all Holocaust films.
|
| 100 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A hauntingly poetic triumph.
|
| 91 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Fateless is a strangely beautiful film, enhanced by a typically lyrical Ennio Morricone score and by Koltai's hazy, grayed-out images.
|
| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly
In the juxtaposition of cataclysmic matter-of-fact misery and cinematic poetry, the filmmaker finds a calmly stunning way to convey the experience of living with death as something intimate, and, unnervingly, almost natural.
|
| 90 |
LA Weekly
Like "The Pianist," Fateless painstakingly builds up the reality of what it is like to be drawn into a perfectly arbitrary hell you can neither comprehend nor rationalize.
|
| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
A first-rate contribution to the Holocaust canon.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
Koltai is an accomplished, Oscar-nominated cinematographer (for 2000's "Malena"), and Fateless is meticulously composed and shot.
|
| 90 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Fateless is both haunting and poetic. It also is visually stunning.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
It represents something stranger and, to those of us with only a secondhand or thirdhand knowledge of that history, more disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the experience itself that can only be described as beautiful.
|
| 90 |
Variety
Exquisitely modulated and superbly mounted, the directing debut of skilled cinematographer Lajos Koltai went through an extended, unpredictable production history to emerge as a genuinely new way of looking at the Holocaust that is markedly different in tone from other such stories including "Schindler's List" and "The Pianist."
|
| 90 |
Village Voice
Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality. The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent.
|
| 90 |
The New Republic
It contains little that will be new to any informed viewer; yet it fascinates for all of its 140 minutes.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
It's a work that sears the heart and conscience. The events are annihilating, the way they're told both beautiful and terrifying.
|
| 88 |
Boston Globe
Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.
|
| 88 |
Rolling Stone
This unique and devastating look at the Holocaust is drawn from the autobiographical novel of 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
At first startling, even disengaging, that strange style eventually dovetails with the awful substance.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Accomplishes the near impossible, bringing a fresh perspective to a horrific subject.
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
The film never lacks dignity. Fateless doesn't look at life at the camp like Roberto Benigni did in "Life is Beautiful."
|
| 70 |
Wall Street Journal
The film's power also lies in the honesty of its observation. Though Gyuri survives unfathomable horrors, he can't forget them and, in the end, doesn't want to. They're the only history he has.
|
| 60 |
Empire
Steve O'Hagan
Holocaust drama shot like costume drama, creating a sense of aesthetic disharmony.
|
| 60 |
Dallas Observer
Viewers still need a window into a character's soul if they are to connect on a deep emotional level. And that is missing here.
|
| 60 |
Chicago Reader
Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.
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