Shoah feels more essential than ever, demanding that its audience not just mourn and monumentalize the past, but experience it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

Shoah remains today an essential film to educate about the history of the Holocaust and the issue of intolerance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 5, 2021

Words can not do justice to the elegance, the importance, nor the tragedy that Lanzmann's nine hour opus encompasses. Though an overwhelming undertaking, Shoah is absolutely essential viewing.

| Nov 13, 2020

If one can stomach 9 hours of hell, Shoah is a masterpiece.

| Oct 1, 2019

When we identify with victims, we believe we see ourselves, but perhaps we are simply looking away.

| Mar 7, 2019

No other film that I have seen about the subject has haunted me as Shoah does: images and voices returning, un-asked and, so to speak, unwanted, when I wake in the night or as I play in the park with my baby son.

| Jun 18, 2018

Its riveting nine hours are perhaps the most important piece of historical cinema we possess.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 9, 2015

With his 9 1/2-hour Shoah, Claude Lanzmann has accomplished the seemingly impossible: He has brought such beauty to his recounting of the horror of the Holocaust that he has made it accessible and comprehensible.

| Jun 3, 2014

By straightforwardly presenting interviews with people who lived through the Holocaust, Lanzmann makes it real again. Even more impressively, he helps us to see how the horror could have happened.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 3, 2014

Lanzmann`s monumental film bears significant witness to the Holocaust. Those who see it will never forget it.

| Jun 3, 2014

Shoah is the greatest use of film in motion picture history, taking movies to their highest moral value. For what director/interviewer Lanzmann has done on film is nothing less than revive history, a history so ugly that many would prefer to forget.

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

Putting a face on inhuman misery, this remarkable achievement demonstrates film's unique power and its underperformed duty.

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

a magnificently disquieting experience--a harrowing descent into the depths of humanity's potential for unmitigated brutality, cruelty, and evil.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 11, 2013

[It] has transcended the cinema to become a primary record of the extermination of European Jews during the Second World War.

Full Review | Mar 19, 2012

It's brilliantly conceived; it's intolerable. It is the indispensable film of any year when it appears.

Full Review | Jul 15, 2011

Why revisit "Shoah'' 25 years after it was first released? Because it matters more a quarter century on, just as it will matter even more in a hundred years, and 200, and - if it and we survive - a thousand.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 20, 2011

the film's achievement is to show there are stories worth hearing, and ravaged, resilient faces that reward our scrutiny. The horror, the gallows humor, the shame and the heroism, the lessons of this holocaust -- and all others--have not been exhausted.

| Jan 14, 2011

To see these places and events described by the voices and faces of those who lived through them is immensely important.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 14, 2011

At a time when the few remaining witnesses to the Holocaust are passing away, Shoah more than ever stands as a necessary experience.

| Original Score: A | Jan 14, 2011

takes to task largely accepted concepts of what is known, what can be imagined, and how people relate to Hitler's mass extermination with an unrivaled formal insight.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 23, 2010