The Innocents's reviews
Media reviews
Los Angeles Times
A gripping psychological drama based on events more than half a century old, it has inescapable contemporary echoes (...) And it proves, yet again, that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences
Indiewire
As much a film about crises of faith as it is the powerful friendships between women, The Innocents steadily unfolds over its nearly 120-minute runtime, revealing new secrets and new surprises (most of them, but not all, appropriately gut-wrenching) at every turn
New York Times
Blistering
The Wrap
Fontaine powerfully conveys the religious women?s inner torment, but with restraint, both visually and verbally.
El País
Anne Fontaine, aided by an excellent artistic direction that dips you in the snow and mud, in the physical and emotional cold, has composed the best work of his career (...) A painful work on the crossroads, that moment In which the smooth path of theories becomes the abrupt terrain of practice
Clarin
Great achievement on novices and nuns whom Russian soldiers raped in a Polish village ... Fontaine is sober ... it increases and extends the sense of anguish of the sisters.
Le Monde
The strength of this narrative written and brought to the screen with all possible sensitivity is to succeed in transmitting this sensitivity to the viewer.
Empire
Played with restraint and individuality by a fine ensemble, this is a moving but provocative study of belief, duty, compassion and acceptance
Variety
Powerful and fascinating
Cinemanía
Frozen story about a secret, survival and humanism
ABC
A film of extreme visual, moral and emotional neatness that addresses (in the end) the situations of abuse and humiliation that "the victors" play in a war zone after their "liberation", and there are as many cases as Wars
Fotogramas
Anne Fontaine tells (...) how horror can be the source of happiness and how reason (the nurse) and faith are doomed to be understood even if they are not understood
El Mundo
An austere film in the formal that portrays a very illustrative episode of the small print of the story
Screen Daily
"Fontaine isn?t reinventing the wheel with this classic tale of faith vs science,but with plenty of winning characters and well-earned heart-tugging moments, Agnus Dei should satisfy traditional art-house audiences"