Critic Reviews

Haneke demonstrates profound insight into the essence of human behavior when all humility is pared away, raw panic and despair are the order of the day, and man becomes more like wolf than man.

In today's digital bog of empty light and marketing deceptions, this is what early-millennium Euro art-film masterpieces feel like--lean, qualmish, abstracted to the point of parable but as grounded as a gravedigging.

There are no zombies out of ''28 Days Later'' to alleviate the slow creep of realistic doom in this chilly, tense corker.

One of the most harrowing and plausible visions of apocalypse since George A. Romero's 1968 zombie shocker, "Night of the Living Dead."

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

Haneke is still a masterful director, and his authority carries this well-acted and attractively shot account of a family from an unnamed city trying to survive in the sticks after an unspecified catastrophe.

At its best, the film sustains the heightened tension of great science fiction, dropping in on a frightening new world that's just this side of familiar.

Time of the Wolf is tough medicine, to be sure. Yet, the movie builds to a note of cautious optimism that is as stirring as it is unexpected.

This is one of Haneke's least powerful films, although the excellent cast is interesting to watch.

Time of the Wolf is grounded so deeply in the reality of society gone awry that the anxiety faced by Isabelle Huppert's character as she struggles to keep her family together transfers onto the audience and never leaves.