Based on Frank Wedekind's Symbolist short story, "Mine-Haha, or The Corporal Education of Young Girls," Innocence often feels like Kafka--arcane rules and regulations--as interpreted by photographer Sally Mann or even author Lewis Carroll.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 14, 2024

If David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman had ever collaborated, it might look something like Lucile Hadihalilović's breathtakingly beautiful "Innocence."

| Oct 24, 2018

With dazzling performances from a largely pre-pubescent ensemble cast, 'Innocence' is without doubt the most disconcerting French debut of the year.

| Aug 1, 2018

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 24, 2011

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 7, 2011

Withholding basic expository material, and unpredictably restless in its focus, Innocence both rivets and challenges emotional engagement.

| Apr 14, 2006

Hadzihalilovic has arrived as a director to reckon with.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 14, 2006

... haunting and hypnotic fairy tale... with a distinctly European sensibility... lovely lingering scenes that cast a spell over the almost abstract story.

| Original Score: A | Apr 13, 2006

...often seems like Picnic at Hanging Rock as directed by David Lynch

| Original Score: A- | Mar 5, 2006

Innocence is beautifully photographed by Benoit Debie, directed with assurance and sure to make you wonder what you've just seen.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 26, 2006

Innocence is full of charm and strangeness -- and a sense that childhood is a place of incredible terrors and fleeting joys, of rapt innocence and fatal experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 15, 2005

I can't recommend this film to my readers, because I don't happen to trust its motives.

| Nov 16, 2005

Innocence is not merely the year's best first film, but one of the great statements on the politics of being 'tween.

Full Review | Oct 24, 2005

It doesn't take long before this bizarre structure becomes interminable...

| Original Score: .5/4 | Oct 22, 2005

Hadzihalilovic succeeds brilliantly at crafting a meaningful enigma that somehow grasps the essence of adolescence, but only grows more mysterious with each revelation.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 21, 2005

One of the oddest, most perplexing -- and delightful -- films to come along this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 21, 2005

A visually lush and eerily enigmatic parable of female sexuality, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's ominous fairy tale raises questions you'll be wondering about for days.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 21, 2005

The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 20, 2005

Men with a penchant for young girls: please stay away.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 20, 2005

What you feel at the end is nostalgia; not just for your childhood curiosity, but for a time when movies boldly allowed suggestion and shadow to control their momentum.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 20, 2005