Popular reviews

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  Review by Tom Sheridan 16

  Something happened at a screening of The Look of Silence.

  Packed house. People were sitting in the dim room prescreening, in that nice little anticipatory void when the screen is black and the house lights haven't quite gone out.

  "This is the kind of movie people go alone to," said one woman, a couple rows ahead of me to her four companions. I nodded. Completely alone in the theater, social dictates mandated that I keep my thoughts to myself.

  The lights went out. Rapt silence descended for a little over an hour and a half, a time that at once felt so much quicker and so much longer. The screen eventually fades to black, after this horrifying depiction of the…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½

  astonishing.

  Oppenheimer's THE ACT OF KILLING follow-up uses a blunter, equally brilliant conceptual approach for a more sedate and unsettling portrait of the Indonesian genocide and the rampant denial that has allowed the perpetrators to survive. the film doesn't get too caught up in the time-honored literary tradition of the revelatory optometrist, it's just one of the many tools Oppenheimer uses to mediate the memories... if the first film was predicated on a sensationalist feeling of HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT HOW THESE PEOPLE HAVE INTERNALIZED THEIR ATROCITIES, the second is happy to have that out of the way, free to instead consider not just what is remembered, but how we change when it is forgotten. memory is not just an…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½

  "Well, that's how it is... Life on earth. Feel free to take a photo."

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  Review by YI JIAN ★★★★★ 8

  You killed innocent people.

  'I don't want to talk about politics.'

  You tortured and massacred my family.

  'You ask too many questions.'

  How do you grant forgiveness to the people who do not ask for them? These people are absolutely blind towards the ugly, disgusting deeds that they've contributed to, be it directly or indirectly, even with newly prescribed glasses they've chosen to look the other way. Politics? Since when did people equate the word with bloodlust and ignorance? The arrogance of these murderers makes my blood boil. In the face of evil and corruption they offered silence, petty excuses, I am looking forward to the day hell is fully booked, won't be too long now.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 1

  90/100

  If there's a more consistently human modern filmmaker than Joshua Oppenheimer, then please point the way. Back in 2012, he created one of the most appalling, essential films of our time, and now he's returned with a companion piece (although that is selling it short) entitled The Look of Silence, documenting the haunting aftermath and the silent vacuum surrounding open wounds. It is a revolutionary film, both in its questions and its answers, allowing an entire family to reach their respective points of understanding (or a lack thereof) without cloying film-making tactics or underlying motivation. It's a film where each scene is more horrifying than the last, building on a resonant sense of history where a cumulative voice of…

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  Review by sprizzle ★★★★½

  The poster is such a beautiful metaphor for this situation. These people can't see. They can't see the atrocities they've committed. They need someone to come and bring these horrors to light. So a glasses salesman sits them down and makes them answer for their actions...No matter how powerful the prescription I'm afraid they'll never be able to see.

  Such a sad, hopeless situation. Such a great couple of documentaries.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  "Once, I brought a woman's head to a Chinese coffee shop."

  just packed with lines like that. like THE ACT OF KILLING, i'm simply not capable of processing this rationally. Adam Curtis might label it something close to his "Oh Dearism", but it's so disarmingly, confrontationally personal -- you can just look into that motherfucker's eyes when he's saying that stuff -- that it appears, to me at least, entirely transcendent.

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  Review by 20oldboy03 ★★★★ 5

  Zwischen den Jahren 1965-1966 wurde unter dem General und späteren Präsidenten Indonesiens, General Suharto, an die „Mittglieder“ und „Sympathisanten“ der Kommunistischen Partei Indonesiens, kurz PKI, ein Massenmord verübt.

  Nach Schätzungen fielen zwischen 500.000 bis 3 Millionen Menschen dem „Massaker in Indonesien 1965-1966“ zum Opfer.

  Paramilitärische Todesschwadronen, angeworben von dem Militär die dadurch versuchten ihre Hände in Unschuld zu waschen – so ihre Hoffnung – durchsiebten ganze Stände nach Kommunisten und ihren Sympathisanten, ermordeten sie und warfen, oftmals, die Leichen zur Entsorgung in die angrenzenden Flüsse und Meere.

  Joshua Oppenheimer zeigt uns, frei von jeden True-Crime-Dokus-Klischees, die Besuche des Optikers Adi Rukun, Bruder eines der Opfer 1965-1966. Auf seine Besuche, die ihn sowohl zu den Opfern wie den Tätern führt, erzählen…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 3

  Deep focus photography, no score to speak of, and a multi-camera crew allow Oppenheimer to craft a much more visually striking, haunting, pensive film than the first half of this documentary series. There have been about four and a half hours of incisive exploration of the modern reverberations of the crimes of 1965, and yet, it still feels incomplete because justice is yet to be served. The currency of this and its companion do add a sense of urgency to them, a sense of being in the moment that sometimes creates tension that won't be there (I hope) in 50 years. Certainly it will feel like a shock to hear the legislative leader openly threaten to bring genocide back, but…

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  Review by Elwood B. ★★★★½ 3

  A gust of madness in their eyes,
  burried in a haze of fiction.
  Not kings, nor gods, nor noble men,
  ripped away that soothing blanket.
  You lost your aces, lost your hand,
  they stole it from you, can't get it back
  Don't you ever try to retrieve it,
  it doesn't belong to you no more.
  In fact, it never did.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★ 1

  52/100

  I remain a skeptic (heretic?) regarding Oppenheimer's Indonesia project, which for all its inarguable courage and good intentions never succeeds in illuminating these atrocities for me. The Act of Killing offered little insight that seemed to justify providing unrepentant mass murderers with a forum to brag about their crimes; though Look Of Silence is often described as taking the victims’ point of view, it’s really just more of the same, with the garish recreations elided and the brother of one victim serving as an overly symbolic ("let me help you see") proxy for Oppenheimer. The killers have had nearly 50 years to rationalize what they did, and watching them refuse to take responsibility for their actions—even in shots of stony, telling silence—just doesn't strike me as revelatory or cathartic. It's like Errol Morris interviewing Rumsfeld all over again, except replace "Why is this man smiling?" with "Why is this man not speaking?"

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  Review by Steven Sheehan ★★★★½ 5

  The past is the past, it is best left there, closed up to remain untouched. This is a sentiment we hear again and again in Joshua Oppenheimer's second film on the Indonesian genocide, spoken by the survivors and their families, as well as the perpetrators and their relatives. Survival is inherently intertwined with suffering however it is inflicted and that lies at the heart of this painful journey.

  The director is far more blunt in his approach compared to the surreal reconstructions of the first film. We see Indonesia's past and future through the eyes of optical specialist Adi, his brother slain under the military rule, now searching for a sense of closure to the bitterness that has enveloped his…