88% In Darkness

All Critics (42) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (37) | Rotten (5)

Honesty is the movie's greatest strength.

One might think that years and years of seeing Holocaust movies would create an immunity, a point at which you can feel no more. But in fact, it works the other way.

Wieckiewicz is outstanding, his open face expressing a full range of emotions, often within the same scene, sometimes within the same conversation. Is he a good man? Or is he a greedy man moved to do good things?

Holland and her screenwriter David Shamoon understand that suffering isn't necessarily ennobling and that sometimes goodness emanates from the unlikeliest sources.

The setting - a rat-infested sewer lit by flashlights and candles - and the memorable central performance from Robert Wieckiewicz etch themselves on the imagination.

Yet another movie in which Jews escape death in the Holocaust through the actions of a gentile with a conscience.

A nail biting triumph from the lethal streets of Nazi occupied Lvov through the sub-human underground of the city and back into the world of the living.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the film comes at the end, when the real facts of Socha's group of Jews are revealed.

What sounds like standard glossy fare is handled with cold candour.

it's hopeful heart is in the right place.

A powerful piece of work. Not hard to see why it's up for the best foreign film Oscar.

Portrayed with gripping tension of ever more draconian choices amidst ebb and flow of human interactions in filthy confines, the cinematography is a staggering tour de force.

Harrowing and intense, it's Schindler in the sewers.

...director Agnieszka Holland builds a tremendous amount of suspense in the dim, confined space of the sewer tunnels, with periodic side trips to the world above-ground.

There's not a moment in this picture when you wish it were shorter, that it would hurry along.

We've seen this movie, if not its particulars, before. That said, Holland's production is beautifully crafted...

More Critic Reviews

No quotes approved yet for In Darkness. Logged in users can submit quotes.

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/in_darkness_2011/

cujo karen handel hangout todd haley kareem abdul jabbar tim lincecum karl rove