Its often personal, painful recollections are illustrated in part by elaborate clay-figure dioramas of prison camp life, to an impact not unlike Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

| Sep 23, 2022

...somehow turns clay into an emotionally captivating storytelling device that, when combined with the emotive French-language narration of Randal Douc and hypnotic musical score of Marc Marder, makes for a truly astounding work of cinema.

| Original Score: A+ | May 2, 2021

To make up for the pictures we don't have, Panh uses small clay figurines, hundreds of them, painted, clothed, with individual expressions on their faces, and placed in meticulously detailed dioramas that he seems to have reconstructed from memories...

| Mar 13, 2019

Consisting of a series of carefully crafted dioramas of human tragedy, The Missing Picture is populated by an intense sense of hopelessness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 7, 2019

There are acts of rebellion and repression... but always subjugating, even in its most cruel or soulless moments. [Full review in Spanish]

| Nov 28, 2018

A visceral, intimate, and devastating film about ideological manipulation and dehumanization. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Nov 27, 2018

The Missing Picture is a work of an excessive aesthetic ambition, could be defined as a hybrid in which the director mixes his family memories with the political transformation that his native country suffered. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 26, 2018

It's a meditation on individualism and poetry; the power of image to remind and exorcise; the ruthless zeal of revolution; the endurance of memory and family, and the human will to survive.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2017

... a miraculous method to represent the unrepresentable.

| Oct 9, 2017

Granted, this is hardly the jolliest way to see in the new year but it functions as an educational tool.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2017

[It] might be one man's version, but it's been given shape. Others can now watch, remember, agree, and disagree about these four years the world can never get back.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 9, 2016

An act of personal and cultural recovery, an exorcism of evil through art and a 'never forget' memoir of survival that reminds us that the past century has been a parade of holocaust.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 12, 2015

Panh fulfills his debts to the dead not just by adding to the visual record of genocide, but also by creating a transcendent work of art.

| Original Score: A+ | Jan 5, 2015

he Missing Picture is a fascinating and vital film of a history that too often remains a footnote or a death toll in the margin.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 5, 2015

These battered, scratched pieces of film are eloquent testimony for the terrible offences that happened.

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

Both great cinema and important journalism, a rare and privileged combination.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 25, 2014

Filmmaker Rithy Pahn, a survivor of the hellish Pol Pot regime, has dedicated himself to documenting it with innovative techniques to recreate the missing history of his murdered family, and of a nation.

| Original Score: B | Dec 24, 2014

The Missing Picture is a haunting and sobering documentary that not only mesmerises with its narrative but also impresses with its collage of techniques that merge seamlessly to give us something truly unique on screen.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 7, 2014

It was an act of utter destruction, a people not just killed but their entire culture erased. Panh's poignant and innovative documentary is an act of creation, remaking the forgotten Cambodia, one clay figure at a time.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 13, 2014

Rithy Panh turns a potential gimmick into a profound, inspiring film. Then, in expanding his scope to the propaganda machine of that regime, he reaches straight into the heart of evil and finds cinema.

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