On the edge of my seat for this one!
The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
Critic Rating
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- Germany,
- Austria,
- France,
- Italy
- 2009
- · 144m
Director
Michael Haneke
Cast
Ursina Lardi,
Ulrich Tukur,
Burghart Klaußner,
Christian Friedel,
Leonie Benesch,
Susanne Lothar
Genre
Drama,
Mystery
In rural Germany just before World War I, strange things are happening to a once-ordinary, authoritarian village society. First thought of as mere coincidence, these troubling acts become more and more frequent, and more and more disturbing in this chilling and hypnotic meditation on the nature of evil.
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100
Village Voice by J. Hoberman
Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator.
100
Time by Richard Corliss
A kind of mashup of "Our Town" and "Village of the Damned," the film is both draining and enthralling.
100
The Hollywood Reporter
It's a superb cinematic work and an appropriately serious one, given its subject matter and its intentions.
100
The Hollywood Reporter by Peter Brunette
It's a superb cinematic work and an appropriately serious one, given its subject matter and its intentions.
100
The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps
Haneke’s latest is essentially an inquiry into the roots of a certain kind of evil.
100
Los Angeles Times by Betsy Sharkey
We don't go to Michael Haneke films for comfort, but to gaze through a glass darkly. That vision -- tense, provocative and unnerving -- is on full display in The White Ribbon, which could be considered a culmination of this difficult director's brilliant career.
100
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
A severe and eerily beautiful German-language drama.
100
Salon by Andrew O'Hehir
Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, The White Ribbon captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence.
100
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The film is visually masterful. It's in black and white, of course.
100
Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones
There’s no denying this is a coldly commanding tale in which Haneke’s signature obsessions--bourgeois control, sexual repression, emotional cruelty, cathartic violence--simmer quietly as subtext before bursting into the open in the final reels.
100
Boston Globe by Wesley Morris
The ends remain loose in The White Ribbon.’ But that lack of closure is thrilling. Haneke lays his movie and its mysteries at our feet, leaving us to ask, “What in tarnation?’’
90
Variety by Todd McCarthy
Immaculately crafted in beautiful black-and-white and entirely absorbing through its longish running time, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon nonetheless proves a difficult film to entirely embrace.
88
New York Post by Kyle Smith
The White Ribbon is one of the finest films that ever repelled me, a holiday in the abyss.
88
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
This haunting film never pushes itself on you. It trusts you to suss out the horror that lies beneath the veneer of innocence. You'll be knocked for a loop.
80
Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf
The White Ribbon comes dangerously--wonderfully?--close to playing like an evil-kid flick.
80
Empire by Damon Wise
A hard film to love, but a hypnotic meditation on all the elements -- gossip, religion, bullying -- that can turn a parish and country bad.
60
New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier
Haneke's superb cast provide beautifully measured hints at the disconnect between the ribbon's symbolism and the entire town's unspoken atrocities.
30
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Chill to the core, Haneke presents human cruelty not to make us empathize with the victims or understand the oppressors but to rub our noses in the crimes of our species. He thinks he’s held on to the subversive ideals of punk, but all I smell is skunk.
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