Critic Reviews

This is moviemaking on the highest dramatic, psychological, and moral plane.

The dark, rotting interiors and sunless winter skies create a festering atmosphere of unexpiated guilt as Kremer ponders the question of how a decent man is to navigate the rivers of hell.

A thoughtfully written drama of ideas with vivid performances by August Diehl and Ulrich Matthes.

Powerful, concise, fully sustained.

It's important for the film to establish the concentration camp as a hell on earth from the start, but Schlöndorff has more in mind than creating another reminder of the inhumanity of fascism.

A morally complex and emotionally satisfying drama about the vagaries of Catholic response to the Third Reich.

It doesn't measure up to Schlondorff's 1979 Oscar winner, "The Tin Drum," but it's compelling nevertheless.

Succeeds in illuminating an almost unimaginably dark story.

Like Costa-Gavras's "Amen." (2002), this German drama uses a true story to examine the Catholic church's response to the Holocaust, but it focuses less on institutional politics than on personal conscience and responsibility.

The Ninth Day is far from perfect, but is still thought-provoking and intriguing, a film that can begin its own kind of debate.