"The Look of Silence" is a sobering, gut-wrenching documentary but also an important one.

| Nov 25, 2024

...at the end of each interview, Rukun reveals his identity to the former killers. The camera captures the most extraordinarily reaction shot, the look of silence.

| Jul 30, 2023

Oppenheimer has developed another important piece of cinema that is as illuminating as it is shocking. I can’t tell you how many times I sat, mouth open and covered by my hand, in utter silence, overwhelmed by what I was seeing.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 23, 2022

Exceptional.

| May 18, 2021

If The Act of Killing was about the identity of a nation who perpetrated a genocide, The Look of Silence is about the other identity, the one that genocide was designed to erase.

| Jan 14, 2021

Indonesian genocide docu sequel has graphic descriptions.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 2, 2020

Moving and devastating, The Look of Silence is a true illustration of the power of movies; you walk out of the theater and never look at the world in quite the same way ever again.

| Original Score: A+ | Jul 5, 2020

Joshua Oppenheimer's companion piece to The Act of Killing, his astonishing portrait of Indonesia's genocide, is a rare cinematic feat: a personal film that frames a horrific inquiry with a transcendent beauty.

| Aug 8, 2019

A documentary duo unlike any other, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence are filmmaking as activism and cinema as history.

| Original Score: A+ | Jul 30, 2019

The Look of Silence definitely packs a lot of power, but it feels more supplementary to Oppenheimer's brilliant first film.

| Jun 15, 2019

A harrowing and humanitarian work, the culmination of Oppenheimer's ten-year effort to let the truth out deserves every superlative that can be thrown at it.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 16, 2019

The Look of Silence doesn't push the documentary form like The Act of Killing, but it's just as emotionally devastating and even more beautifully shot and edited, with a keen awareness of the effects of eerie silences and ghostly compositions.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 19, 2019

Judging from the reactions of the murderers The Look of Silence captures, this may be a conversation that could go on for decades. Heaven knows where they'll end up, but at least through this film and Adi's mission the victims have a voice.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 7, 2019

The Look of Silence brings the ferocity to the big screen with a delicate lens, and this juxtaposition is the reason why I would claim this is one of the best documentaries of the year.

| Nov 9, 2018

Oppenheimer almost entirely dispenses with the intertextual parlour games of The Act of Killing, and instead seems more content to let his camera quietly capture the story.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 8, 2018

The film's harrowing tales of murder, mutilation, and the difficulty of forgiveness, are painfully true.

| Aug 29, 2018

The conversations are sharply-observed; Oppenheimer keeps in a lot of material that less confident directors might have cut.

| Aug 8, 2018

The Look of Silence is a much more somber and telling work, and while it lacks "Killing's" lurid enigmatic allure, it's no less dark and registers wholly, one hundred times, more human.

| Apr 16, 2018

A follow-up to his 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer delivers an even more heart-wrenching narrative in this intimate companion piece.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 26, 2018

The Look Of Silence's harrowing nature means it is one of the best films I'll never watch again

| Oct 10, 2017