Metacritic reviews

With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery.

This extraordinary Italian thriller is a study in contrasts: light versus dark, youth versus maturity, the playful versus the lethal.

With a graceful confidence Salvatores has made a movie in which good and evil flow into each other as easily as day and night.

With its unique perspective on both the coming-of-age and thriller genres, the movie deserves to be seen by a wider audience than the one that normally frequents subtitled movies.

In the guise of a nerve-jangling thriller, director Gabriele Salvatores, an Oscar winner for "Mediterraneo," delivers a fierce, frightening and deeply moving study of childhood. It's a keeper.

It's hard to find a current release that so effectively teases the mind and emotions.

While another director might have imbued the story of a Sicilian boy awakened to his parents' involvement in child abduction with more emotional weight and thematic depth, Salvatores' classically illustrative treatment should open arthouse doors for the visually sumptuous production.

A lyrical throwback to such movies as René Clément's "Forbidden Games" (1952) and other works of the humanist European cinema of a half century ago. [12 April 2003, p. 89]

Cinematographer Italo Petriccione gives the film a dramatic look, but that never compensates for the lack of actual drama; when so much of the conflict concerns Cristiano's reluctance to betray his father, it might have helped to spend more time on exploring that relationship than on capturing what light looks like when it pours in from a cellar door.

The upshot is a general fog of two-dimensional characterization, slowly churning plot gearwork, and an ineffective air of forced lyricism.