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

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

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

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

Bursting with pretentious pap about women's journey from a state of undefiled innocence to sullied slutdom.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 18, 2005