Katyn
Koch Lorber Films | Release Date: February 18, 2009 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
81
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 17 Critic Reviews
Positive:
16
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
A great movie. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)James Adams
There's no redemption here. Indeed, if anything is redemptive about Katyn , it's the fact of the film itself. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda musters the power of classical filmmaking and personal emotional investment to dramatize a stunning atrocity long covered up. Read full review
90
VarietyLeslie Felperin
This plays almost like an academic master class, meticulously exploring the event's ramifications but only catching full fire at the end. Read full review
90
The New YorkerDavid Denby
This tenacious artist has now given his father a proper memorial and has reasserted, with power and grace, the history and identity of his nearly effaced country. Read full review
88
TV Guide MagazineBruce Eder
An unrelentingly powerful and seamless indictment of two brutal political systems. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy Burr
A history lesson for a country and a people forced to forget at gunpoint. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Now Wajda has brought some small measure of rest to their names, to Poland, and to history. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubNoel Murray
Wajda makes the murders look horrific and jangled, like something out of "Hostel," then ends Katyn with extended darkness and silence, allowing the audience to mourn for the death of a nation. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
The period sets, costumes and cinematography all superbly recreate the brutal era, grand illusions and everyday suffering of the Poles under both the Nazis and the Soviets. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
It is filmed with simplicity, a purity of intent, and I wanted to watch the faces of these men in their last seconds of life--not for the sake of history, but because of Wajda's imperative to put his father's death onscreen. He needed to do this. And somehow, sanity is restored. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
The result is a film with a stately, deliberate quality that insulates it against sentimentality and makes it all the more devastating. Read full review
75
New York PostKyle Smith
Wajda, who lost his father in the purge, gives the film an awful silence and mystery at its core. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJoshua Katzman
Andrzej Wajda has spent much of his long career dramatizing major events in Polish history, and this poignant feature depicts the circumstances surrounding the Soviet Union's massacre of thousands of Polish officers in the spring of 1940. Read full review
70
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
While never less than fascinating, Katyn alternates between scenes of tremendous power and sequences most kindly described as dutiful. It's as if the artist is never certain whether he is making this movie for himself, his father, or the entire nation. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
Katyn will not join Wajda's list of masterworks. In its final flashback, however, when we're taken back to the forest and the details of what really happened, we see what we must see, the clear-eyed way we should see it. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe Neumaier
A pensive and searching drama that explores how deep into the national psyche these murders in the Katyn forest went. Read full review
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