The way the film smoothly transitions from live-action to animation, from today's struggles to Lemkin's past, shows how much of Lemkin's experiences, including what he fought against, remain tragically relevant to this day.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 11, 2019

Belzberg presents a view of modern challenges in combating genocide that, while not entirely thorough, is a sobering reminder of the difficulty of those efforts.

| Original Score: B | Oct 16, 2015

Moves beyond outrage at singular atrocities. . .to credit Lemkin's prescience in demonstrating difficulty in identifying genocide, to stop it, and meting out punishment.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 9, 2014

The movie feels too short at two hours; it offers a worthwhile overview of the subjects but doesn't treat any of them in much depth.

| Nov 6, 2014

Anyone possessed with even a fleeting sense of social justice should be amazed and appalled by what he/she sees and learns in Edet Belzberg's Watchers of the Sky.

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

Even at two hours - an eternity for a doc - the movie never feels too long.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 30, 2014

An extraordinary documentary about a heroic peacemaker who coined the term "genocide" and fought to bring those responsible for mass killings to trial.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 24, 2014

It isn't a hopeful story, but it is a story of how committed people have fought and struggled to create the possibility for hope in the future.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2014

Well-researched, potent and equally informative, emotionally devastating and exhausting.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | Oct 18, 2014

Watchers of the Sky takes on a vast subject - genocide over the past century - and manages to be not just coherent but poetically moving.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 17, 2014

The sheer amount of information that Belzberg had to organize, and fit into a seamless whole, is awe-inspiring. The pace feels like an unstoppable river, the current of history, the continuum of atrocity that Lemkin and others sensed.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 17, 2014

Succeeds in throwing a much-needed light on a man whose hermitlike life remains mysterious, but whose legacy will shine on for the ages.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 16, 2014

The film's message is so powerful, some of the poetic flourishes are unnecessary.

| Oct 16, 2014

"Watchers of the Sky" is a film that can dash hopes about humanity but also raise them in depicting the stories of these tireless defenders.

| Oct 16, 2014

Tough to watch, but essential.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 16, 2014

Watchers of the Sky shrewdly mixes archival footage, animated history, field reports of atrocities, and both anguished and heartening talking-head interviews with hope-stirring scenes of actual people standing up to the greatest evil of our age.

| Oct 14, 2014

This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 12, 2014

In Watchers of the Sky, Belzberg offers a sharp reminder of how primitive our coexistence as a global community remains.

| Original Score: B | Oct 10, 2014

There is quite a lot of onscreen reading to be done as well as watching but the passages of Lemkin that Belzberg chooses are always well-illustrated either by the animation or archival footage.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 7, 2014

Social justice is a hard and often nebulous concept to depict in a documentary Belzberg actually revels in the elevated aspects of the discussion.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Feb 17, 2014