Austerlitz

Everyone is looking, looking, looking. Looking at what? Buildings, walls, yards, enclosures. The victims are not there. The war criminals are not there. The past is not there.

What one collects by the end is a rounded portrait of humanity, and, somehow, one of hope, despite the ghastliness of human crimes and the need to revisit them.

The present-day worth of preserved Holocaust death camps is tacitly addressed in Sergei Loznitsa's brilliant observational doc.

Austerlitz‘s people-watching pleasures are complicated but don’t resolve in any one direction.

The film is relatively silent -- there is no added commentary, no titles, no extra sound -- capturing an emotional detachment that is hard to shake, all the more so because of its prevalence.

Exhibiting a simplicity and intellectual acuity that is far too rare in the field of documentary, Loznitsa has created a film whose cumulative impact will stay with you long after you watch it.

The film's visual and spatial incongruities impose tacit condemnation-a kind of guilt-by-participation determination-but, more plaintively, the contrasts allow for a sustained contemplation of the elegiac, of memorialization.

...it is precisely the director's economy and calm before this loaded historical subject that makes Austerlitz all the more powerful.

To watch his film is to simply watch people walk in the footsteps of atrocity and wear their natural, instantaneous unguarded responses.

Prepare to draw plenty of conclusions about and insights into human nature from their ordinary exploits, including many that you won't expect.