but tied into the United States and Europe in the Iraq War. The Hollywood Reporters Kirk Honeycutt credited the film for a thorough exploration of "guilt, communication and willful amnesia", and praised the cinematography. Film Comment contributor Michael Joshua Rowin considered it Haneke's most political work to date, "not merely liberal hand wringing" in its depiction of "passive-aggressive oppression and its manifestation as a slow-building, unresolved societal tension". A.O. Scott wrote that while he could criticise it as a liberal exercise in inducing guilt, it was "hard to deny its creepy, insinuating power". Roger Ebert awarded it four stars, lauding its focus on "paranoia and distrust" rather than providing a whodunit conclusion, and remarking on the way characters hide so much from each other, reflecting the title. The Guardians Peter Bradshaw gave the film five out of five stars, describing it as "one of the great films of this decade" and "Haneke's masterpiece". For the BBC, Matthew Leyland gave it four stars, citing the mounting suspense over themes of guilt. In a review for The Atlantic, Christopher Orr described Caché as "a broad political allegory about Western guilt and a meditation on the nature of seeing." Film Quarterly critic Ara Osterweil compared Caché to the 1966 Blow-Up in making "challenges naïve assumptions of ocular mastery". Caché's detractors include Andrew Sarris of The New York Observer, who wrote, "Too much of the plot's machinery turns out to be a metaphorical mechanism by which to pin the tail of colonial guilt on Georges and the rest of us smug bourgeois donkeys". In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle called it "a handsome fraud [...] in its style, technique and ultimate message", becoming dull and "a drab social polemic". The Nations Stuart Klawans judged it not a statement of "liberal guilt" but "liberal self-regard" in having Majid choose to die for Georges's sake, in Klawans's interpretation. Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader called Caché a "brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution", writing that "Haneke is so punitive toward the couple and his audience that I periodically rebelled against—or went into denial about—the director's rage, and I guess that's part of the plan." Calum Marsh of Slant Magazine writes that in Caché "Haneke’s predilection for deceit served a high-minded, if still somewhat suspect, intellectual purpose". Ebert added the film to his Great Movies list in 2010, expressing disbelief about missing a possible "smoking