Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 2, 2006

Is the survivor entitled to ordinary human happiness -- or is this human emotion an act of disloyalty and diminution? These questions are a vital part of this outstanding film's dark and sombre power.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2006

Perhaps the fault lies more with Ennio Morricone's lavish, emotionally bullying music, which cancels out all the reticence and nuance of the script.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 6, 2006

We're meant to see the camps with a naive adolescent eye, but director Koltai misjudges his material, and his fastidious paletting and highly orchestrated set-pieces are curiously low-impact; beautiful where they should be beastly.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 5, 2006

Fiercely unsentimental and surprisingly beautiful, Hungarian drama Fateless does the seemingly impossible: it succeeds in portraying the subject of the Holocaust in a new and devastating light.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 5, 2006

Relatively few films touching on the Holocaust are worthy of their subject; this one is.

| May 4, 2006

A reflection of how its main character comes to experience reality, as one small moment between what came before and whatever horror or happiness is yet to come.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 20, 2006

Many of the images in Fateless are familiar, but they're presented so unsparingly, so uncloaked by emotion, they become freshly potent.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Mar 25, 2006

Epic in scope and imagery, the film is a haunting look at mankind's capacity for inhumanity, as well as survival.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 24, 2006

The film is on a level just slightly below Schindler's List and The Pianist, and only because Koltai is a less powerful, practiced director than either Steven Spielberg or Roman Polanski.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 18, 2006

Fateless presumes audiences know the details of how European Jews moved from ghettos to camps to liberation, so Koltai frequently jumps right past the big changes, and dwells instead on the tedious hours inside the train on the way to Auschwitz, an

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Mar 15, 2006

With its first-person approach, Fateless joins other classic films about the Holocaust (Shoah, Schindler's List) by vividly portraying an event that can seem remote as the number of eyewitnesses shrinks each year.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Fateless accomplishes the near impossible, bringing a fresh perspective to a horrific subject about which a multitude of films already have been made.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 24, 2006

Koltai, a veteran cinematographer whose credits include more than a dozen movies by István Szabó (Mephisto, Sunshine), has managed something near miraculous with this hypnotically paced, lyrically downbeat, weirdly dreamlike 140-minute movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 3, 2006

Not only do the scenes set during the war develop a cumulative emotional power, but those in the war's immediate aftermath give us a glimpse into a truth seldom explored -- a truth that only a survivor can possess.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 3, 2006

Fateless is an extraordinary film, not just for its harrowing attention to detail of life within the concentration camps, but for the equal place of privilege it gives to life before and after World War II.

| Feb 2, 2006

A first-rate contribution to the Holocaust canon.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 26, 2006

... a remarkably tough-minded debut by Lajos Koltai ...

| Jan 26, 2006

This unique and devastating look at the Holocaust is drawn from the autobiographical novel of 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 20, 2006

More than just another Holocaust memoir, Fateless is something special: an unforgettable portrait of grief and hope, loss and transcendence.

| Jan 11, 2006