Innocence

With dazzling performances from a largely pre-pubescent ensemble cast, 'Innocence' is without doubt the most disconcerting French debut of the year.

Withholding basic expository material, and unpredictably restless in its focus, Innocence both rivets and challenges emotional engagement.

Hadzihalilovic has arrived as a director to reckon with.

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.

Based on Frank Wedekind's Symbolist short story, "Mine-Haha, or The Corporal Education of Young Girls," Innocence often feels like Kafka--arcane rules and regulations--as interpreted by photographer Sally Mann or even author Lewis Carroll.

If David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman had ever collaborated, it might look something like Lucile Hadihalilović's breathtakingly beautiful "Innocence."

... haunting and hypnotic fairy tale... with a distinctly European sensibility... lovely lingering scenes that cast a spell over the almost abstract story.

...often seems like Picnic at Hanging Rock as directed by David Lynch