An urgent portrait of the last living generation of Hitler's Third Reich in never-before-seen interviews raising vital questions about authority, conformity, national identity, and their own roles in the greatest human crimes in history.... (Full plot summary below)
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An urgent portrait of the last living generation of Hitler's Third Reich in never-before-seen interviews raising vital questions about authority, conformity, national identity, and their own roles in the greatest human crimes in history.
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| The Irish TimesTara BradyThis is a vital companion piece to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and it ends with a chilling coda. |
| San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleIn the end, the power of Final Account resides in the way it shows how human nature reacts to lies, propaganda and state-sanctioned atrocity. Some people, looking for an excuse to do evil, will jump right in. A very tiny faction will risk all to fight against them. |
| RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyThe spirit of Claude Lanzmann, whose monumental Shoah remains a nonpareil cinematic text on the Holocaust, lingers over and around Final Account, a film assembled by Luke Holland around interviews he conducted beginning in 2008. |
| Slant MagazineChris BarsantiLuke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreIf Final Account has a shortcoming, it’s that few moments stick out as most chilling of all. |
| Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperWhat makes Final Account so intriguing and, yes, so infuriating, is seeing and hearing from so many Germans who are near the end of their days and have somehow managed to make excuses, to rationalize, to distance themselves from the hell that was their homeland in the 1930s and 1940s. |
| ReelViewsJames BerardinelliFinal Account may ultimately be more important for the voices it immortalizes than for its worth as a conventional documentary. |
| Austin ChronicleMatthew MonagleFinal Account is about today as much as yesterday, and that makes it perhaps the most urgent World War II documentary of them all. |
| Rolling StoneDavid FearAn oral history of a once-broken, brainwashed nation, Final Account is the end result of Holland’s efforts to collect testimonies on the unthinkable before those who were there are gone. |
| CNNBrian LowryThe "important" label can weigh heavily on a documentary, but the description applies to "Final Account," director Luke Holland's decade-long odyssey to capture and preserve the memories of Germans who lived through the Holocaust, acknowledging their complicity to varying degrees. While much has been done to chronicle survivors' stories, this sobering companion belongs on the shelf alongside them. |
