The Zookeper's Wife's reviews
Media reviews
Indiewire
And decency, in its raw, instinctive form, is ultimately what earns ?The Zookeeper?s Wife? a place in the self-conflicted canon of Holocaust cinema.
Entertainment Weekly
Even at its most engaging (those cubs!), Zookeeper can?t help evoking the dozens of films that have told these stories before, and better
Screen Daily
This considered, muted drama can?t escape a fussy tastefulness ? not to mention inevitable comparisons to more crackling treatments of similar subject matter.
The Guardian
The movie works best, though, when director Caro keeps things dialogue-free. The scenes in the ghetto are horrifying and, impressively, able to find corners of life that haven?t been exposed in the myriad Holocaust films that have come before.
Variety
There?s no nice way to put it in this case, but The Zookeeper?s Wife has the unfortunate failing of rendering its human drama less interesting than what happens to the animals ? and for a subject as damaging to our species as the Holocaust, that no small shortcoming.
The Hollywood Reporter
As with many other portrayals of this ugly period, the movie's central figures and their experiences have been cleansed of complexity, embalmed in a sort of hagiographic glaze that makes even the pain look pretty. Harrowing things happen, but it?s the easiest kind of "tough watch?; we know exactly what we?re supposed to feel and when we?re supposed to feel it
The Wrap
The ?abi?skis were as unfailingly heroic as it gets, but memorably rendering a resistance shouldn?t be so resistant itself to the rough-and-tumble humanity of the details, and the unsentimental doom that shrouded it all.