93% Lore

All Critics (87) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (81) | Rotten (6)

It's a harrowing walk through the heart of darkness.

Saskia Rosendahl gives an impressively poised performance as the beautiful teenager, whose determination to protect her remaining family coincides with her growing revulsion toward her parents.

"Lore" is not a pretty story, but it is a good and sadly believable one.

"Lore" is not a love story, nor the story of a friendship. Rather, it's a story of healing and of how breaking, sometimes painfully, is often necessary before that process can begin.

A fiercely poetic portrait of a young woman staggering beyond innocence and denial, it's about the wars that rage within after the wars outside are lost.

Full of surprises, the movie draws a thin line between pity and revulsion - how would you feel if you had discovered your whole life had been based on lies?

Texture and detail embellish a provocative story

Child of Nazi parents faces an uncertain future

[Director Cate] Shortland directs with an almost hypnotic focus, favoring Lore's immediate experience over the big picture.

Rosendahl's performance is raw and compelling, as Lore fights for her siblings' survival and grows up in a hurry.

Lore and her siblings make a harrowing journey across Germany

Worthwhile, but so subtle that it's frustrating.

The Australian-German co-production takes an unconventional tale and turns it into a challenging, visually stunning and emotionally turbulent film experience.

Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother's house we go. Except this ain't no fairy tale... unless it is, perhaps, a hint of the beginnings of a new mythology of ... scary childhood and even scarier adolescence...

With a child's perspective on war, "Lore" deserves comparisons with "Empire of the Sun" and "Hope and Glory," and with a feisty female protagonist it stands virtually alone.

Rosendahl...provides both narrative and emotional continuity to a film whose deliberate pace and fragmented presentation of reality might otherwise prove exasperating.

A burning portrait of consciousness and endurance, gracefully acted and strikingly realized, producing an honest sense of emotional disruption, while concluding on a powerful note of cultural and familial rejection.

Although there are moments that push the story a bit beyond credulity, Shortland has created something remarkable by forcing us to find within ourselves sympathy for this would-be Aryan princess.

Stunning, admirable and indelible - truthfully chronicling the triumph of the human spirit - in a class with Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon.'

Can we spare some sympathy or hope for the children of villains, even if they too show signs of their parents' evil? Lore provides no easy answers.

The portrait is miniature and yet indelible, a ghostly reminder of the 20th century.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lore/

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