"Damnation is one of Susan Sontag's favorite films and it's easy to see why. (M)any of the hallmarks of (Antonioni and Tarkovsky's) relentless black-and-white style and vision-lots of rain, fog, and stray dogs; murky and decaying bars; artfully composed long takes made up of very slow and almost continuous camera movements, offscreen mechanical noises-are so forcefully present here that one might argue that the film makes a fetish of gloom. The rather bare story line in the middle of this-a reclusive loner is hopelessly in love with a cabaret singer, hopes to find salvation in her, and gets her husband involved in a smuggling scheme so he can spend some time with her-seems almost secondary to the formal beauty of Tarr's spellbinding arabesque around the dingiest of all possible industrial outposts. The near miracle is that something so compulsively watchable can be made out of a setting and society that seem so depressive and petrified."-Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader