Metacritic reviews

This is a Holocaust movie that is so relentlessly observed and so aware of woe that it never feels like it belongs to a genre.

This exceptional film features some of the most beautiful cinematography ever seen on film, in service of some of the most horrible images imaginable.

Profound and majestic.

One of the greatest of all Holocaust films.

In the juxtaposition of cataclysmic matter-of-fact misery and cinematic poetry, the filmmaker finds a calmly stunning way to convey the experience of living with death as something intimate, and, unnervingly, almost natural.

Exquisitely modulated and superbly mounted, the directing debut of skilled cinematographer Lajos Koltai went through an extended, unpredictable production history to emerge as a genuinely new way of looking at the Holocaust that is markedly different in tone from other such stories including "Schindler's List" and "The Pianist."

Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality. The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent.

It represents something stranger and, to those of us with only a secondhand or thirdhand knowledge of that history, more disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the experience itself that can only be described as beautiful.

Fateless is both haunting and poetic. It also is visually stunning.

Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.