Popular reviews

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  Review by RobotPolarBear 17

  ME IN 2016: Someone should have told Claude Lanzmann to Shoah Don't Tell-ah, hahaha

  ME IN 2019: Oh fuck, an actual fascist liked this bizarrely popular joke review - time to put a disclaimer at the top to distance myself from those pieces of shit

  ME IN 2023: OK, everyone's stopped looking - time to finally replace this stupid thing with a better, less disrespectful joke, like "Shoah? I hardly even knew her!"

  ME IN 2026: Oh fuck, an actual fascist liked this still-popular joke review - time to put a disclaimer at the top to dista

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  Review by russman ★★★★½ 6

  Well, this is one way to spend your entire Saturday

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 1

  had to be broken into two viewings due to the duration and difficulty of subject but previously i had only seen clips in college, mostly with regard to the visual craft of the interviews when we were studying documentary form, so i’m glad i finally took the time to sit through all 9.5 hours of it. through a combination of minutely, horrifyingly detailed first-hand accounts of the torture and genocide of jews during the holocaust (from victims, witnesses and perpetrators) and tranquil contemporary footage of the locations, landscapes and architecture that was once home to them lanzmann creates this quiet, routine, ghostly mood around the act of witnessing (theirs and ours) and a major work of historical documentation. the scars…

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  Review by 🐱Andrew Chrzanowski🐱 ★★★★★ 9

  "They had it coming."

  Normally I like to start reviews with an important quote or phrase from the film. This time, however, I've got one from real life, as this is attributed to my late grandmother, a Polish Catholic who passed away 10 years ago this month. She was 91 then, and she was born in the US shortly after her parents emigrated from Europe.

  Babcia (something of the Polish word for grandmother) was a good woman, at least what I knew of her. I mean she died when I was 25, so I was no kid. I knew her. But my uncles always said that her harsh religious upbringing instilled some prejudices. (For what it's worth, that entire side…

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★★ 18

  At a certain point learning about history just reduces people to statistics. Shoah is so vital because it tries to make history be about people again. It is a reminder of how seriously we should treat history. It is an act of historical record, letting survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust speak. Their words are preserved here, and even when interviewed through a translator the translator is not edited out, allowing the original answers to be heard exactly. Shoah is not a history lesson, nor does it examine the origins or events of the Holocaust. Instead it is a document of what people saw, collected through individual testimony. It isn't chronological nor comprehensive, but a mosaic of stories from people…

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  Review by CJ Probst ★★★★★ 5

  At 9 hours and 26 minutes, enduring this is the very least you can do.

  I don't care who you are or what's going on in your life, you have everything to be thankful for. There are no words for the type of suffering discussed in this monumental and essential examination of some of the worst atrocities that mankind has ever inflicted upon itself in its entire existence. It is impossible to comprehend or visualize the things that you hear. It still continues today.

  We should all wake up each morning and be grateful that we have the gift to live. Countless millions were never given that chance. Whether to meditate on films like these or to reflect in your prayers, it is important to remember an entire people whose existence was scattered to the wind, and in your own way let them not be forgotten.

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  Review by Two Cineasts ★★★★★ 6

  “HARD TO CAPTUERE IN WORDS”
  

  Hi everybody, well how should I start to write something about a nonfictional topic that has change the world and the way how my homecountry Germany was seen in the world forever. Normally now I would write a short summary, but I won’t do that right now. I just give you a short description of how I feel. I already told Nico, the other part of „two cineast“, that this is probably the toughest review I will ever write. I feel overpowered, carried away, sympathized and powerless and helpless, about the fact that this happened right here, Germany, in the time of my ancestors.

  I am talking about the Holocaust, and this is exactly what…

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  Review by Dragonknight 14

  ”My god, why hast thou forsaken us?”

  It’s absolutely impossible – and more importantly unfair – to rate Shoah or rank it against any other movie. I’m not even sure if I can call this a film. Shoah is the kind of experience that rattles you, it brutally drags you out of your comfort zone and makes you watch, hear and imagine things that are extremely tragic and shockingly inhumane and like many of its interviewees who burst into tears while remembering their horrible memories you will find yourself devastated and numb by the end of this frightful and eye-opening nine hour journey. Trust me, this is a life-changing experience.

  French director Claude Lanzmann opens a window into the dark…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★ 1

  Shoah is a profound achievement in documentary filmmaking as well as a heart-wrenching memorial about the Holocaust. It features long lingering images of the countryside around the Nazi death camps which create a perception that even nature still hasn't recovered from the terrible events which transpired there, let alone humanity. Directed by Claude Lanzmann who chooses against utilising sadly all too familiar archival footage to communicate the atrocities; instead, he decides to linger on the expressions of observers, evildoers and the survivors of this terrible chapter in history while additionally exhibiting vacant synagogues within the communities that were once occupied by Jews.

  Juxtaposed with the stories from concentration camp survivors as they share their dreadful memories are some almost incomprehensible…

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★★★ 7

  Criterion Collection Spine #663
  (Foreign language film)
  (Documentary)

  (Quest to Conquer the BFI/AFI Greatest Films of All Time Lists)

  Follow in the footsteps of the millions of people that were horrifically murdered, during one of humanity's' darkest periods of time.

  "All, in all, those were bad times. It's a fact we tend to forget, thank God, the bad times more easily than the good. The bad times are repressed."

  It does not matter how long it takes you, everyone should invest the time to witness Claude Lanzmann's staggering 9 1/2 hour documentary known as Shoah. After being completely devastated while revisiting 'Shindler's List' recently, I finally decided it was time to experience this epic recap of how the Nazis went…

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  Review by Cecil Selwyn 🔮 ★★★★ 6

  It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness.

  While the full Ebert review this infamous quote comes from is surprisingly decent, I feel the need to address statements like it and the disservice they do to art and our means of engaging with it.

  Shoah is absolutely a documentary, journalism, propaganda (what isn't?), and, of course, political.

  Statements such as Ebert's are indicative of a widespread process described best in Ways of Seeing: the mystification of art, an "analysis" that, intentionally or not, disconnects the work from the viewer. There are echoes of this sentiment all over reviews of the film: that it's unrateable, not a film, an act of objective…

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  Review by Ziglet_mir 2

  This review is for Part I. 

  I have sat through the raw and visceral vision of Come and See, the beautiful yet pretentious 7 hours of Satántángo, the insanely “mental” waltz of The Cremator, and most recently the emotional payload of Schindler’s List. Each of these films are great in their own way (some better than others), but none of them can match the definition of a living, breathing document like Shoah can. I also speak of each of these films in relative similarity and not as exact comparisons since I realize Tarr’s film has nothing to do with what the other three films are about and each one is handled quite differently. What pronounces Shoah above all of these…