Richard Brody

“The Wikipedic superficiality and political frivolity with which these grand historical and psychological themes are applied to the gory drama are matched by the appropriation of a few jingling baubles of feminist dialogue meant to get viewers hungry for “substance” to salivate. They’re the product and the fruit of lazy filmmaking. The movie has nothing to say about women’s history, feminist politics, civil violence, the Holocaust, the Cold War, or German culture. Instead, Guadagnino thrusts some thusly labelled trinkets at viewers and suggests that they try to assemble them. The result is sordid, flimsy Holocaust kitsch, fanatical chic, with all the actual political substance of a designer Che T-shirt. When a few riffs of dialogue, midway through the film, speak of a character’s fate in Theresienstadt, one wants to tell the script to get that word out of its mouth.”
― Richard Brody