92
Metascore
34 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawIt is a gut-churning film: and a radical dive into history, grabbing the past in a way a conventional documentary would not.
- 100VarietyPeter DebrugeVarietyPeter DebrugeNever before has anyone made a documentary like The Act of Killing, and the filmmakers seem at a loss in terms of how to organize the many threads of what they capture...Still, essential and enraging, The Act of Killing is a film that begs to be seen, then never watched again.
- 100The PlaylistJessica KiangThe PlaylistJessica KiangPresenting a terrifying view of a hidden holocaust and a moral apocalypse in which the most basic humanities have become twisted beyond recognition, The Act of Killing is a towering achievement in filmmaking, documentary or otherwise.
- 100Village VoiceNick SchagerVillage VoiceNick SchagerMore terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema's capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance.
- 90New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNew York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinThe resulting film is bizarre to the point of trippiness, yet it’s one of the most lucid portraits of evil I’ve ever seen.
- 88Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerSlant MagazineAndrew SchenkerIn Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.
- 79Film.comFilm.comThe most gut-wrenching 'making of' documentary ever made.
- 70The New YorkerAnthony LaneThe New YorkerAnthony LaneThe project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer.