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The Protector(Protektor)

✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Czech Republic, Germany · 2009
1h 38m
Director Marek Najbrt
Starring Jana Plodková, Marek Daniel, Klára Melíšková, Sandra Nováková
Genre Drama

A Czech journalist joins a Prague radio station what broadcasts Nazi propaganda in order to protect his Jewish wife. However, as the Nazi rule over Czechoslovakia calls for more and more collaboration, his relationship with his wife spirals downward.

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50

Village Voice by

Najbrt gets the look and feel of noir fatalism down, but storytelling that alternates between roughshod and lethargic means the film doesn't hold together as much more than pretty fragments.

40

Time Out by David Fear

Protektor is simply another in a long line of diluted stories about life during wartime, one whose diminished returns only further trivialize a legacy of real-life horror.

50

The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis

Dipping in and out of luminous black and white, Protektor has a distancing glamour that prevents the story from digging in. Burdened by a central relationship so lacking in passion that its fate becomes negligible, the film's narrative feels trivialized by jaunty musical fragments and repetitive cycling and rowing motifs that belabor Emil's metaphorical treadmill of appeasement.

50

Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier

Engendering an experience both visually slick and narratively sprawling, the apropos-of-nothing professionalism of Protektor often feels more like branding than filmmaking.

70

The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden

Young director Marek Najbrt, commendably, is not interested in wringing easy tears from the European experience of World War II. In the handsome drama Protektor, he brings a cool, noirish slant to a story of Czech artists and intellectuals as they accommodate and to a lesser extent resist the German occupiers.

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