San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

The Zookeeper’s Wife achieves its grandeur, not through the depiction of grand movements, but through its attentiveness to the shifts and flickers of the soul.

The Film Stage

There’s something powerful to be read into every action, line, and image. Subtle yet striking, this is a film that is filled with the power of exquisitely executed storytelling.

The Film Stage by Chelsey Grasso

There’s something powerful to be read into every action, line, and image. Subtle yet striking, this is a film that is filled with the power of exquisitely executed storytelling.

Village Voice by April Wolfe

True to form, Caro seems unbound by her audience’s expectations of a WWII picture; she delivers a singular, thrilling portrait, filled with surprises and moving performances.

The Seattle Times by Moira Macdonald

It’s a remarkable story, told in a movie that doesn’t always quite live up to it; except for a few crucial scenes, The Zookeeper’s Wife feels a bit too soft-focus for the devastating story it tells.

Chicago Tribune by Katie Walsh

The film's flaws in pacing and suspense are easily overlooked in the shadow of Chastain's moving performance, as well as the performances of those around her. Caro unspools an evergreen tale about the clarifying power of empathy to diffuse fear and hatred.

New York Post by Sara Stewart

Caro (“Whale Rider”) largely forgoes the eardrum-shattering ballistics of a typical war movie — yes, there are bombings and shootings, but they’re the backdrop, not the focus. Her film dwells more in the aftermath of violence.

Observer by Rex Reed

In the end, it’s the animals who conquer the emotions and provide the suspense in The Zookeeper’s Wife.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

An emotional experience that is straight-ahead but satisfying.

New York Daily News by Joe Dziemianowicz

Antonina is often seen and cradling animals — a lion, a monkey, a rabbit. Fitting, since Chastain elevates and handily carries The Zookeeper’s Wife.

Entertainment Weekly by Leah Greenblatt

Even at its most engaging (those cubs!), Zookeeper can’t help evoking the dozens of films that have told these stories before, and better.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

Decency, in its raw, instinctive form, is ultimately what earns The Zookeeper’s Wife a place in the self-conflicted canon of Holocaust cinema.

Slant Magazine by Kenji Fujishima

The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.

Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

This considered, muted drama can’t escape a fussy tastefulness — not to mention inevitable comparisons to more crackling treatments of similar subject matter.

The Guardian by Jordan Hoffman

All told The Zookeeper’s Wife is a story worth telling, even if there are a good number of not-so-hot spots along the way.

Screen International by Tim Grierson

This considered, muted drama can’t escape a fussy tastefulness — not to mention inevitable comparisons to more crackling treatments of similar subject matter.

The Hollywood Reporter by Jon Frosch

As with many other portrayals of this ugly period, the movie's central figures and their experiences have been cleansed of complexity, embalmed in a sort of hagiographic glaze that makes even the pain look pretty. Harrowing things happen, but it’s the easiest kind of "tough watch”; we know exactly what we’re supposed to feel and when we’re supposed to feel it.

Variety by Peter Debruge

There’s no nice way to put it in this case, but The Zookeeper’s Wife has the unfortunate failing of rendering its human drama less interesting than what happens to the animals — and for a subject as damaging to our species as the Holocaust, that no small shortcoming.

TheWrap by Robert Abele

The ?abi?skis were as unfailingly heroic as it gets, but memorably rendering a resistance shouldn’t be so resistant itself to the rough-and-tumble humanity of the details, and the unsentimental doom that shrouded it all.