The running time (like all Lanzmann's films) is not oppressive but allows for Murmelstein and his interlocutor to talk through, around and inside the context and reality of pragmatism, egoism, heroism and evil.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 4, 2019

Claude Lanzmann has created a new film whose heart is the interview footage shot for his monumental "Shoah" project of Austrian Benjamin Murmelstein, the so-called last of the Jewish Elders, those nominally in charge of the Nazis' Jewish ghettos.

| Nov 16, 2017

The Last of the Unjust breaks with the rigorous approach its director previously employed to find a just way to talk about the Nazis' mass murder of the Jews with film.

| Oct 2, 2017

To some degree, the force of The Last of the Unjust is delivered in spite of Lanzmann's laxness as a filmmaker.

| Apr 12, 2016

The best one can say for this troubling, if intermittently fascinating, mess is that it succeeds in raising questions, moral as well as aesthetic, that it cannot answer.

| Dec 31, 2015

At three and a half hours, this documentary sometimes feels both overlong and far too detailed, but filmmaker Claude Lanzmann knows that this material is vitally important, and by putting it all out there he challenges the viewer to understand the truth.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 12, 2015

Each viewer will judge its truth for themselves, but the director's compassionately unsentimental acceptance is clear and profound.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 11, 2015

This is a complex and very moving documentary.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 9, 2015

The Last of the Unjust is cinema at its very best.

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

Lanzmann draws on unused footage of a 1975 interview in Rome with Viennese rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein to assess his role as the sole surviving member of the Jewish Council installed by the Nazis to help run the Theresienstadt ghetto camp.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 9, 2015

Haunted and haunting.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 8, 2015

The 89 year-old director has lost none of his bold inquisitiveness in a Shoah follow-up that plunges the viewer deep into the hustle and anguish of the Czech ghetto.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 8, 2015

A historical restoration for a modern day reckoning.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 8, 2015

The Last of the Unjust demands patience and commitment from the viewer but the reward is an utterly fascinating, spellbinding history lesson.

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

Much, much more than an afterthought or postscript of Shoah.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 5, 2014

Watching the film is like entering a labyrinth, following a winding thread of story that seems unlikely ever to come to an end.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 2, 2014

A glimpse into the horrific life of an unlikely statesman chosen to destroy his people.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 15, 2014

Lanzmann is so close to this topic that he can't seem to understand what is and isn't necessary to give the audience what they need.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 8, 2014

Murmelstein addresses Lanzmann's skepticism and questions with earnestness, passion and -- as if the rest of it wasn't troubling enough -- what seems like total recall.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 6, 2014

Lanzmann organizes the material achronologically, presenting Murmelstein's narrative out of order and intercutting it with footage of Theresienstadt shot in 2012; this complex structure evokes a sense of moral vertigo that's nearly impossible to shake.

| Feb 28, 2014