The White Ribbon has certainly been getting an incredble amount of praise. As most know, it won the prestigious Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was just nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes. Not to mention the numerous reviews praising it as one of the greatest films this year’s had to offer. The White Ribbon was a great movie, but it was not an amazing movie.

I’m probably just saying this because my expectations were too high, but I just didn’t find it as perfect a movie as many are saying. There are many movies that came out this year alone that I found were better movies. This isn’t to say I didn’t like the movie because I did, a lot. I just don’t believe it can be held to the caliber of other movies that have been released this year.

Getting past all that, The White Ribbon was a fantastically well-made movie made in stark brisk black and white that truly brought you to Germany before WWI. The story was incredibly well directed and acted. It was a tense look at morals in a small town during a time of deceit, strange occurances and no answers. It told a simple tale with relentless meaning.

That’s all well in good, but throughout the movie it seemed that The White Ribbon was concerned less with involving and entertaining me as a viewer and more concerned with award winning and as a result, The White Ribbon seemed a bit dry and even boring at times. Overall, The White Ribbon was a really good movie, but didn’t offer as much entertainment value as I would have hoped.

Grade: B+