Metacritic reviews

It's impossible not to be moved and shocked by The Last Days, the haunting documentary about five Hungarian Jews who survived Hitler's "final solution" to exterminate the Jewish people.

The stories these five people tell are disturbing, powerful, and brave, and the footage discovered by the filmmakers absolutely shocking.

Each person's story is so compelling it is worthy of a feature-length documentary itself. If The Last Days has a flaw, it is that the stories have been so abbreviated to keep the film moving quickly that they feel incomplete.

Moll's film is a far cry from the elegiac poetry of, say, Night and Fog; it's a document more than an examination, and its power of record is inarguable and incorruptible. And then, at the end, somehow you find yourself with that least likely of expressions on your face, a smile, courtesy of Representative Lantos.

In Spielberg's Schindler's List there are the famous shots of the little girl in the red coat (in a film otherwise shot in black and white). Her coat acts as a marker, allowing us to follow the fate of one among millions. The Last Days, directed by James Moll, is in a way all about red coats--about a handful of survivors, and what happened to them.

While much of the archival footage presented in The Last Days is new, the substance is familiar. These are the kinds of images that no Holocaust film can ignore, because they drive home the horror of what transpired five decades ago, half a world away.

The horror of the images is unforgettable, but what lingers are the small particulars of the survivor's stories, recalled as if it all happened yesterday.

Ironically, the very slickness of the film and the attention grabbing 'sensitivity' of Hans Zimmer's score at times become intrusive. Essential viewing, none the less.

A hard-hitting, well-organized documentary grounded in the stories of five Hungarian Jews who lived through the Holocaust.

But for the most part, The Last Days fails to play as a document of the survivors' lives, or even as their memory of that time. Rather, it feels removed, distant, a document of an attempt to re-create a memory.