The Round-Up deals with the entrapment and systemmatic destruction of a group of 1848 Hungarian nationalists in revolt against the Austro-Hungarian empire. Amos Vogel wrote: "A poisonous lyricism-antiromantic and reflective of the truths of the twentieth century-permeates his inexplicable charades of inexorable cruelty, submission, betrayal, and repression, in which victims and oppressors constantly change places and no one remains uncorrupted by the exercise of violence. Beginning with The Round-Up, his best, Jancsó's stylized tragic-epic works have all concerned themselves with the problems of power and oppression, in images of searing plastic beauty and in sequences of implacable violence and terror set against ominous, brilliant landscapes of the most cruel black and white. These are visual metaphors of truths better expressed obliquely, the anguished statements of a pessimistic humanist haunted by the problem of totalitarianism, war, and the corruption of power."