76
Metascore
25 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawIn its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.
- 100The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenThe Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenIts perspective is entirely fresh, eschewing the standard, and more readily engrossing, nonfiction custom of first-person testimony and faces in dramatic close-up. Peering into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger, McQueen stirs up something more complex than emotion.
- 80The TelegraphRobbie CollinThe TelegraphRobbie CollinFor the most part, sound and image are irreconcilable, so you find yourself either listening in horror or watching with pleasure, only for the spell to be broken by some eye or ear-catching detail in the other temporal strand.
- 80Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganScreen DailyFionnuala HalliganAfter four hours, there’s no sense you know the city, present or past, or that you ever will understand it. Would maps and timelines make it any more ‘satisfying’? Instead, you are haunted by it..
- 67IndieWireDavid EhrlichIndieWireDavid EhrlichMcQueen’s pointillistic approach invites our minds to wander freely between then and now, his film less interested in shuddering at the specifics of its awful facts than it is in probing our ever-evolving relationship to them, but the documentary’s monotonousness resists deeper engagement.
- 67The PlaylistCharles BramescoThe PlaylistCharles BramescoWe’re implored to never forget through a format that makes particulars prohibitively hard to remember.
- 60Time OutPhil de SemlyenTime OutPhil de SemlyenEven with its cramp-preventing intermission, Occupied City’s epic runtime doesn’t deliver the same accretion of emotional power that makes, say, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust doc, Shoah, so great. Instead, it begins to open itself up to monotony and worse, glibness.
- 58ColliderTherese LacsonColliderTherese LacsonOccupied City starts off strong, but after the intermission, you can feel how aimless the documentary is at times, with the final act feeling almost excruciatingly long.
- 50The Film StageLuke HicksThe Film StageLuke HicksSteve McQueen’s first documentary feels more like an unedited podcast with dizzying visual accompaniment than a feature film, despite ruminating on its subject, Amsterdam under Nazi occupation, for more than four hours.