50
Najbrt gets the look and feel of noir fatalism down, but storytelling that alternates between roughshod and lethargic means the film doesn't hold together as much more than pretty fragments.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
40
Protektor is simply another in a long line of diluted stories about life during wartime, one whose diminished returns only further trivialize a legacy of real-life horror.
60
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Though it remains a little too enigmatic, Marek Najbrt's Holocaust drama is atmospheric enough to keep us edgy on its heroine's behalf.
50
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Dipping in and out of luminous black and white, Protektor has a distancing glamour that prevents the story from digging in. Burdened by a central relationship so lacking in passion that its fate becomes negligible, the film's narrative feels trivialized by jaunty musical fragments and repetitive cycling and rowing motifs that belabor Emil's metaphorical treadmill of appeasement.
50
Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier
Engendering an experience both visually slick and narratively sprawling, the apropos-of-nothing professionalism of Protektor often feels more like branding than filmmaking.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden
Young director Marek Najbrt, commendably, is not interested in wringing easy tears from the European experience of World War II. In the handsome drama Protektor, he brings a cool, noirish slant to a story of Czech artists and intellectuals as they accommodate and to a lesser extent resist the German occupiers.