Critic Reviews

It’s a good bet that the director had “High Noon” in mind when he made this film, but the comparison ends there. As a compact study of wartime guilt, the film has the look and feel of a waking nightmare.

Simple, powerful, made with conviction and skill, 1945 proceeds as inexorably as Sámuel and his son on their long walk into town. It's a potent messenger about a time that is gone but whose issues and difficulties are not even close to being past.

Collaborating with DP Elemér Ragályi, Török also invests the movie with strong visual motifs, perhaps most prominently a consistency of shots that peer at characters through everyday barriers (windows, curtains). The resultant sensation of uncomfortable prying underlines the boiling suspicions that power the plot.

The gripping period drama offers a fresh, intelligent cinematic approach to a difficult topic.

A new film that takes an unflinching look at a nation’s anti-Semitism that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Director Ferenc Török departs from the High Noon arc, and finds a way to end the movie with an invocation of violence, rather than an eruption of it. His final image, gruesome and evocative, is unforgettable.

Torok juggles plenty of characters and themes — guilt, greed, Russian meddling, the Holocaust, justice — but he always remains firmly in control of his story. Every frame is meticulously crafted.

Here’s a clever, sideways take on the grimmest of human horrors, a clever parable that delivers the same heavy message, but with mordant wit and originality.

Absorbing and finely wrought, 1945 is not perfect.

It’s far from a perfect, or even great, film, but 1945 is certainly both commendable and recommendable. It has something to say about complicity of everyday people in the crimes of society, and says so in a fairly quiet, methodical, unassuming (if a bit obvious) way.