Hadzihalilovic succeeds brilliantly at crafting a meaningful enigma that somehow grasps the essence of adolescence, but only grows more mysterious with each revelation.

One of the oddest, most perplexing -- and delightful -- films to come along this year. And last year, too.

Confronts the line between the celebration and the exploitation of innocence with an uneasy tension that is discomforting at best.

Innocence is not merely the year's best first film, but one of the great statements on the politics of being 'tween.

This is the weirdest film I've seen all year, or at least the weirdest good film. It's also among the most powerful.

This genuine curio maintains its mystery to the end.

The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.

A visually lush and eerily enigmatic parable of female sexuality, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's ominous fairy tale raises questions you'll be wondering about for days.

An unashamed art picture, the kind of film where extreme aestheticism mixes with nightmare dread, where the story resembles a bad dream and where Freudian symbols cluster around the events like a swarm of insects. It's a very pretty film, but it's also lean, enigmatic and so obscure.

Hadzihalilovic, the wife of cinematic agent provocateur Gaspar Noé and his sometime collaborator, has created a work of limpid beauty and eerie menace that some undoubtedly will dismiss as kiddie porn.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that an allegory is "an extended or continued metaphor." And to think that this definition was coined when a French film called Innocence was still very far in the future! But how aptly this film proves the point.

Sustains a pervasive feeling of anxiety and suspense, despite an absence of dramatic conflict or resolution.