Winter in Wartime (Oorlogswinter) receives good reviews

Winter in Wartime (2008). Photo: film shot

Winter in Wartime (Oorlogswinter) runned this past weekend in three cinemas in New York City and Los Angeles, which yielded an amount of $16,200 and opened to good reviews . In the US the movie holds the seventh position on the site of most popular films this weekend.  Filmdistributor Sony Pictures bought the film after it has been nominated by the Academy Awards for best foreign production in 2009. 

"...a brisk little movie (and has one twist at the end I know I didn’t see coming). And a few of the performances are fine. But this is still a story we’ve heard before" (Stephen Whitty in the New Jersey Star-Ledger). Sheri Linden wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Straightforward and solid but only mildly involving.... Director Martin Koolhoven elicits strong performances... but fails to sustain tension... smooth and reassuring, never truly gripping".

The spartan world of Martin Koolhoven’s sober, well-made World War II melodrama, Winter in Wartime, is a rustic blue-gray landscape of woods and snow-covered roads through which armed German soldiers roam in trucks. This handsome film, set in a village in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and shot in Lithuania, is an adaptation of a semiautobiographical 1972 novel by the Dutch author Jan Terlouw, who lived under German occupation for five years. 

For full New York Times review by Stephen Holden (March 17, 2011)