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

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

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

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

The narration is dispassionate. The film lets us find our own way to outrage and sorrow.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 8, 2024

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.

| Jan 4, 2024

Here, we have instead an endless parade of shots that show scant observational acuity, paired with narration that seems designed to overwhelm our ability to comprehend it. Mr. McQueen has created a documentary that gives little life to history.

| Dec 29, 2023

As “Occupied City” continues to juxtapose the city’s history with its present — with chronicles of varying length that chart Jewish struggle, resistance, death and survival — the film builds tremendous force.

| Dec 24, 2023

Overwhelms via length and monotony, employing a challenging form that’s both its greatest strength and, ultimately, its most frustrating weakness.

| Dec 23, 2023

Every film is a collection of moving images, but few are as moving as the sights that compose “Occupied City.”

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 22, 2023

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 25, 2023

It’s an attempt to find a new way of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, as the people who remember it firsthand disappear.

| May 22, 2023

The intertwining temporal spaghetti adds to the unsettling cumulative effect of a singular masterwork.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 18, 2023

In the hours and days following its conclusion, you might just find your heart and soul demolished, and somehow made whole again.

| May 18, 2023

The beat’s emotional wallop illustrates how far a little showing can go, a truism McQueen rejects with a limiting approach that opts instead to tell and tell and tell.

| Original Score: B- | May 18, 2023

What's under our bed and on our doorstep is only mounting up. May we all be as bold as McQueen in bringing it to light.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 18, 2023

While the film’s sober, steady tone is actively un-tear-jerking, McQueen has scattered some lyrical interludes through the running time... to allow his audience to decompress.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 17, 2023

I’ll be blunt: The film is a trial to sit through, and you feel that from almost the opening moments.

| May 17, 2023

A striking encounter between then and now.

| May 17, 2023