The Innocents is not a great movie, but it’s a very good one, and maybe Deborah Kerr’s performance should really be called great.

| Sep 11, 2023

I’m so happy that this fairly strange picture has been so widely embraced and it is heartening to realize that audiences do gravitate towards artistically ambitious fare sometimes.

| Feb 10, 2023

Child abuse is at the core of this unsettling shocker. Nightmares may follow.

| Original Score: FIVE STARS | Mar 13, 2022

Atmosphere is the name of the game here and while some may be turned off by THE INNOCENTS' deliberate pacing, I was quite enthralled. The ending is truly chilling.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 13, 2021

Splendidly acted highbrow horror film creating eerie cam- era poetry on an English country estate of half a century ago.

| Nov 17, 2020

It's an unreputable classic of the genre featuring outstanding performances, stunning cinematography and a ballsy... script by Truman Capote.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2020

It must be granted at once that no shot, no sequence, approaches James -- but there are moments when the film faithfully reflects that existence of evil in the innocent which is the core of the written word.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2020

Somehow I was never involved; it was always a classic reverentially transcribed... The lines were faithfully carpentered from James' story, but they remained... lines.

| Jul 11, 2019

In horror movies women are often a sobbing mess for much of the film, but [Deborah] Kerr soldiers through the scares, clear-eyed, until the end when her tears are truly earned.

| Mar 12, 2019

Deborah Kerr has never done better: I would almost say I didn't know she could give a performance of such power.

| Jul 13, 2018

Acutely unnerving, magnificently played, and just plain gorgeous.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 18, 2017

It creeps slowly up on the viewer: a drip-feed of fear fed by creaks, eerie children and shadowy demonic figures on the periphery of this world and the next.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 22, 2015

Having Truman Capote adapt Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (two taxonomists of beasts in the jungle of the Id), is an act of genuine inspiration.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 29, 2014

This classic ghost tale is based on Henry James' 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw.

| Original Score: A- | Nov 1, 2014

the beauty enhances the dread by intensifying our sense of how feeble even the most luminous of surfaces can be in hiding the horrors beneath, which is appropriate for a film awash in Freudian subtext

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 17, 2014

You can watch 'The Innocents' twice and walk away with different conclusions. Psychological horrors have imitated its ambiguous ending ever since. Few have pulled it off half as creepily.

| Oct 6, 2014

Kerr's performance vibrates with complicated tension and vulnerability, as she communicates the internal life of a woman constantly at war with herself.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 6, 2014

That rare ghost story that fires on all cylinders: it's tremendously acted, sensationally photographed in deep-focus black and white, sumptuously produced and, best, genuinely frightening.

| Oct 2, 2014

This is a space with ample room for both the living and the dead.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 23, 2014

Oozing ambiguity, Jack Clayton's shimmering gem is a masterclass in suggestion, a flawless evocation of the uncanny which pits the subconscious against the supernatural to genuinely hair-raising effect.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 16, 2013