Occupied City
A24 | Release Date: December 24, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
76
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 25 Critic Reviews
Positive:
18
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Original-CinLiam LaceyApr 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
Film ThreatPerry NortonJan 3, 2024
McQueen has aced the task of translating Stigters’s book, putting her research into an educational and provocative collage and bringing it gracefully to another medium and a wider audience. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisMay 20, 2023
Time is stretched differently in Occupied City and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenMay 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
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 20, 2023
In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 21, 2023
McQueen and Stigter haven’t just excavated some not-so-ancient history; they’ve also made a haunting, magisterial tribute to a city they clearly love. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comRobert DanielsJan 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
81
Paste MagazineAnna McKibbinOct 25, 2023
Despite its overwhelming runtime, Occupied City is pressed forward by searing urgency. Anytime audiences are warmed by the serenity onscreen, they are promptly struck by the pain and chaos of each story. Sometimes the two coalesce in brilliant, unanticipated ways. Read full review
80
EmpireKambole CampbellFeb 13, 2024
While it can be a lot to take in, Occupied City is a poignant sociological portrait. Through the history of one space, it studies how fascism pushes people out of spaces  — but is also hopeful on resilience, solidarity and resistance. Read full review
80
Little White LiesSophie Monks KaufmanFeb 9, 2024
Occupied City is a staggeringly ambitious feat of emotional stamina and in the unrelenting litany of horror stories presented here, one thing is clear: he wants us to remember something, anything. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeFeb 8, 2024
For all the undeniable power of Occupied City, some will wonder if, given its formal repetitions, the piece should not be presented as an installation. Maybe. But the concentration and lack of distraction allow that greater degree of immersion. That sense of being dragged through a narrative – even a non-linear one – is a vital part of its unsettling appeal. Read full review
80
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganMay 20, 2023
After 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.. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 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
80
TheWrapMay 20, 2023
It’s exactly because of the repetitive, monotonous pace and structure of Occupied City, a film that smartly omits talking-head interviews and archival footage entirely, that McQueen’s excursion feels as spiritually searching as it does. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah-Tai BlackApr 30, 2024
As much as Occupied City’s observational eye is rooted in a humanistic and cumulative approach to history, it will, no doubt, leave those in search of a less austere approach wanting. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerJan 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
67
The PlaylistCharles BramescoMay 20, 2023
We’re implored to never forget through a format that makes particulars prohibitively hard to remember. Read full review
67
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 20, 2023
McQueen’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. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeFeb 11, 2024
Feels closer in approach to his early gallery installation work than it does to his narrative film-making. Read full review
60
The Daily BeastNick SchagerDec 29, 2023
Overwhelms via length and monotony, employing a challenging form that’s both its greatest strength and, ultimately, its most frustrating weakness. Read full review
60
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 20, 2023
Even 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. Read full review
58
ColliderTherese LacsonMay 20, 2023
Occupied 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. Read full review
50
The Film StageLuke HicksMay 20, 2023
Steve 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. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesJan 5, 2024
Mr. McQueen has created a documentary that gives little life to history—or, for that matter, to the present that treads forever in its shadow. Read full review
40
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 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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