They are dark, thoroughly uncompromising works of a filmmaker completely fearless to take an audience into dank recesses of the human condition.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 19, 2003

If stars could be awarded on the basis of good intentions, The Grey Zone should be king of the galaxy. Unfortunately, it lands on earth with something of a thud.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 18, 2002

Even in its darkest moments, a heartening defiance underlies gut-wrenching calamity.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Nov 15, 2002

[Nelson's] movie about morally compromised figures leaves viewers feeling compromised, unable to find their way out of the fog and the ashes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 7, 2002

Like the Ancient Mariner, Nelson grabs us by the collar and says, You must know about this. You must bear witness. And so you do.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Nov 7, 2002

Jagged, unrelenting, claustrophobically intimate.

Full Review | Oct 25, 2002

Although the movie takes us further into the actual process of industrial death at Auschwitz than any American movie has yet dared, The Grey Zone never stoops to sensation or melodrama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 25, 2002

Easier to respect than to love.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 25, 2002

Nelson's work is relentless, grueling and courageous.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 25, 2002

The film ... presents classic moral-condundrum drama: What would you have done to survive? The problem with the film is whether these ambitions, laudable in themselves, justify a theatrical simulation of the death camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 25, 2002

No dramatic feature has ever come quite this close to the matter-of-fact ugliness of the Nazi crimes.

| Original Score: A | Oct 25, 2002

American and European cinema has amassed a vast Holocaust literature, but it is impossible to think of any film more challenging or depressing than The Grey Zone.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 25, 2002

I have seen a lot of films about the Holocaust, but I have never seen one so immediate, unblinking and painful in its materials.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 25, 2002

The Grey Zone should be seen: It's a worthy ordeal, with flaws that, ironically, make grist for later arguments.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 25, 2002

There's a stagy poetry to everything -- sometimes it works and sometimes it screams of artifice.

Full Review | Oct 24, 2002

The film's sense of imagery gives it a terrible strength, but it's propelled by the acting.

| Original Score: B | Oct 24, 2002

One can't deny its seriousness and quality.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 24, 2002

From both a great and a terrible story, Mr. Nelson has made a film that is an undeniably worthy and devastating experience.

| Oct 23, 2002

A bleak, difficult and stunning film.

Full Review | Oct 21, 2002

Nelson ... invests this unusual Holocaust drama with dramatic intensity that in no way cheapens its subject matter.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2002