Dark Days is well-paced, knowing when to ramble and when to pull you up short. Great editing. Great choices of which stories to tell on camera.

| Jul 31, 2023

Dark Days is an unimaginable story, skillfully documented by a passionate film making novice, and wonderfully scored by the high-profile DJ Shadow.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 21, 2020

The documentary is amazing.

| Original Score: B | Apr 29, 2014

This is the world discovered and illuminated by gonzo documentarian Marc Singer, who spent a good part of two years living with and chronicling the lives of a half-dozen tunnel dwellers for his remarkable first film, Dark Days

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 3, 2014

Moving and memorable.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 3, 2014

The virtue of Dark Days is that it provides a forum for its subjects, who turn out to be funny, charming, acerbic, annoying, callous, kind and, ultimately, fully human. The movie's other quality -- a dewy romanticism -- is both an asset and a detriment.

| Mar 3, 2014

The lives of these people inside their shacks are full of surprises as well as grim confirmations, but the things we don't know about them also significantly shape our experience of the film.

| Mar 3, 2014

Singer deserves credit for attempting to put a human face on such tragic circumstances, but he appears to have gotten so close to his main subjects that he seems unwilling to make them, or their desperate situation, look too bad.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 3, 2014

Some of these hardy souls have lived this way for years, decades even, and they've lived not just to tell the tale but to suggest that they've created a viable alternative existence. At times, Dark Days almost makes you envious. But only almost.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 3, 2014

Marc Singer's documentary Dark Days absolutely blew me away. It takes the viewer on a thoroughly engrossing journey to the heart of darkness.

| Mar 3, 2014

Singer's grainy... photography lends the film the evocative aura of something that has been unearthed, while the spare, haunting soundtrack by DJ Shadow perfectly captures the sense of otherworldliness that pervades this remarkable film.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 3, 2014

Revealing, if occasionally frustrating.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 3, 2014

As we come to know the residents, we find their lives, and yearning for home and safety, as tragic, funny, and involving as anything in a scripted movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 3, 2014

A fascinating, beautifully photographed portrait of a vanished community: a group of homeless people who built a shanty town in the train tunnels beneath Penn Station.

| Mar 3, 2014

Singer's stark black-and-white photography renders their world with the abstract horror of a German expressionist film, yet he's equally skilled at coaxing the grim personal stories of life underground.

| Mar 3, 2014

It's hard not to get caught up in these people's lives, or to be impressed by their resiliency.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 3, 2014

Singer captures intimate moments in the lives of his subterranean protagonists in their strange, crepuscular world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2014

A portrait of the homeless community of "mole people" who lived in sections of disused underground tunnels in New York, this is a singularly powerful account of the lives of the dispossessed and desperate.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 3, 2014

Designed neither to warm your heart nor shelter you in the comfort of liberal guilt, the movie does what so many style-conscious, "subjective" documentaries have long forgotten how to do. It shows you a world, and stays the hell out of it.

| Mar 3, 2014

Singer achieves remarkable intimacy with his subjects, who share their experiences and joke around with the man behind the camera as freely as they do with their peers.

| Mar 3, 2014