Critic Reviews

• Kyle Smith, New York Post

  So gripping and focused that it easily bests Hollywood movies with 50 times its budget.

• Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

  In place of emotional stakes, we get gleaming, stylized, occasionally slow-motion violence, filmed in such extreme close-ups and cramped spaces that it's impossible to differentiate gunman and victim.

• David Fear, Time Out New York

  Only the overstylized, near-colorless cinematography offers any shades of gray (actually, nothing but shades of gray); everything else is rendered in the most black-and-white way possible.

• Mark Holcomb, Village Voice

  The Assault is so tense, it seems to pass in a single held breath-so quickly, in fact, that you don't register its narrative flimsiness until later on.

• Philip French, Observer [UK]

  The staging is meticulous.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  Shot in black and white, it is well made and helped by copious research.

• Phelim O'Neill, Guardian [UK]

  The kind of serious, adult action movie that the US and UK struggle to make.

• David Jenkins, Little White Lies

  A very robust piece of filmmaking with subtle shades of moral complexity to boot.

• Ethan Alter, Television Without Pity

  Curiously lacking in tension.

• Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal International

  Exploiting film's visceral, kinetic and pummeling power to the max, this fact-based thriller about the 1994 Algerian terrorist hijacking of a Paris-bound flight is an outstanding achievement in genre entertainment.

• Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine

  Could have been better, had Leclercq resisted to urge to include the soap operatics ... It's solid - but it should have been gripping.

• Alison Willmore, AV Club

  Brisk and technically efficient, The Assault is a dull film based on a real event that certainly wasn't.

• Harvey S. Karten, Compuserve

  A tension-filled dramatization of the actual hijacking of a French airbus in December 1994.

• Robert Tumas, Slant Magazine

  Julien Leclercq's The Assault works hard at finding its human factor, the thread linking the cold-blooded facts of the 1994 hijacking by Muslim extremists of Air France Flight 8969 and the people on the plane.

Read all 14 critic reviews