Fateless Reviews
ColeSmithey.com
"Fateless" is an essential film in the canon of holocaust film because it vividly tracks the specific brand of hatred that torture and genocidal murder inures.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Eye for Film
In cutting through the conventional cliches of Holocaust presentation to a more singular truth, Gyuri defies viewers to refuse him the license to tell his own story as he himself saw and felt it, rather than as others might prefer him to tell it.
Uruguay Total
Una película de sobrecogedora belleza que se las arregla para arrojar nueva luz sobre un tema trillado y recurrente.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Film Journal International
Masterfully directed, acted and shot, this is world cinema at its absolute finest.
Laramie Movie Scope
Haunting, affecting and beautiful in its own way, although slow-moving and overlong.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
In a long list of Holocaust films, this sublime one is well-worth seeking out.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Top CriticFateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Window to the Movies
Plays out as a constant tug-of-war between what makes it trite and what makes it unique, although what makes it unique has the better chance of sticking with you.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
Guardian [UK]
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Independent
Perhaps the fault lies more with Ennio Morricone's lavish, emotionally bullying music, which cancels out all the reticence and nuance of the script.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
BBC
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Empire Magazine
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Relatively few films touching on the Holocaust are worthy of their subject; this one is.
Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
When Gyorgy speaks, like a junkie remembering his addiction, of 'the happiness of the camps,' the moment is far scarier than the images of pale corpses and hangman's nooses.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Lajos Koltai's.. textured re-creation of enduring the unimaginable with quiet delicacy is the most hauntingly beautiful film about the Holocaust ever made.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
TheMovieChicks.com
This is haunting because it's a look inside the concentration camps through the eyes of a child.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
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-
Epic in scope and imagery, the film is a haunting look at mankind's capacity for inhumanity, as well as survival.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Blogcritics.org
No depiction of the extermination camp experience of an individual has ever been so large; it verges on the ecstatic.
