Occupied City

Name: Occupied City
Genre: History, War, Documentary
Released: December 24, 2023
Duration: 246 min
Rating: 76
Cast: Melanie Hyams

2023

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Generally favorable reviews based on 25 Critic Reviews

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Occupied City

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Movie Details & Credits

A24 | Release Date: December 24, 2023 | Not Rated

Starring: Melanie Hyams

Summary: The past collides with the present in this excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam: a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic and protest and a provocative, life-affirming reflection on memory, time and what's to come.

Director: Steve McQueen

Genre(s): History, War, Documentary

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 246 min

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Critic Reviews

100

Liam Lacey

Apr 26, 2024

Occupied City is designed not so much to provoke emotions as to challenge our capacity for paying attention (“It’s okay to drift in and out,” recommends McQueen in the film’s production notes.) When we focus, we’re compelled to connect the double strand of the narrated past history and contemporary images in front of our eyes. Read full review

100

Sheri Linden

May 20, 2023

Its 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. Read full review

RogerEbert.com Robert Daniels

Jan 2, 2024

McQueen doesn’t aim to achieve an arresting horror or to explain one person's grief. This urban interrogation is a frank interplay between survival and oblivion, selflessness and selfishness, continuity and demolition. Read full review

The Telegraph Robbie Collin

May 20, 2023

For 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. Read full review

Richard Whittaker

Jan 11, 2024

It's a lot more than simply a string of names and dates and anecdotes, but after this many hours that's what it starts to become. Read full review

The Observer (UK) Wendy Ide

Feb 11, 2024

Feels closer in approach to his early gallery installation work than it does to his narrative film-making. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

May 20, 2023

In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it. Read full review

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