The feature is more about repetition than testimony. Narrator Melanie Hyams’ recounting of individual lives aims for an accumulative force.

| Oct 11, 2024

Occupied City is undoubtedly rewarding, both as an example of what boundaries non-fiction films can push, and as the output of an artist who, whatever the subject, forces us to pay attention.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 17, 2024

In Occupied City, past and present merge. The Amsterdam of today and that of the past exist in the same breath, both struck by their tragedies, respectively the struggles of our modern age and the Nazi occupation of the city.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 14, 2024

Director Steve McQueen paces his 4h, 26m essay at an unhurried pace, often leaving you to dwell on streetscapes without any narration. Absorbing as the film is, it’s a demanding sit...the option to soak it all in at home might serve the film better.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 22, 2024

<i>Occupied City</i> haunts even as you watch: its length does not exceed its reach.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 2, 2024

An ambitious, relevant and exhausting film, that grows tiresome and tedious even as it illuminates because of its repetitiveness and its over four-hour length.

| Original Score: B- | May 22, 2024

One thing Occupied City won’t do, even with the cool, prestige imprimatur of A24, is win over today’s distracted youth. Too much context can be tedious.

| May 14, 2024

The deeper structural vulnerability to Occupied City is that for all its efforts to keep both yesterday and today alive and in dialogue, much of which is absorbing and successful, the contemporary it depicts already feels vacuum-sealed.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 27, 2024

Steve McQueen’s Holocaust documentary is inscribed on a map of the present.

| Original Score: A | Apr 26, 2024

McQueen offers a film that isn’t dispassionate, but rather, with an awareness of such a lengthy history of narrative representation, likens itself to testimony rather than re-enactment.

| Apr 25, 2024

by this act of geographic memory, the almost-too-expansive collective grief reveals the impossibility of full remembrance and full oblivion.

| Feb 22, 2024

Occupied City can be hard-going but it's also an elegant and serious meditation on history in motion, mounted with a cumulative intellectual and emotional power.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 20, 2024

Worthy but too tedious to overwhelm your emotions.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 16, 2024

Filming during 2020’s pandemic, this becomes a time-jumping double-portrait of his adopted home city, though the inexact mirroring often cracks.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 13, 2024

Occupied City grows mightily oppressive. If the intention was a documentary from the point of view of the city, you feel occupied all right.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 12, 2024

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.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 12, 2024

Worthy but too tedious to overwhelm your emotions.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 9, 2024

With World War II soon to be wiped from living memory, and as the right rises again in Europe, Occupied City is a difficult but important piece of observed art.

| Feb 9, 2024

That subject matter, combined with a four-hour-plus running length, does sound forbidding, but McQueen has found a way of making the past seem pertinent, and Occupied City makes for mesmerising viewing.

| Feb 8, 2024

The full cut will, [Steve McQueen] has said, be 36 hours which I can imagine as an installation running on a loop in a museum so you can spend ten minutes in front of it and then move on. Ten minutes is probably all you need.

| Feb 8, 2024