| 90 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Not only is the film a powerful historical record and a warning for future generations, it is an essential reminder to people, including many in Japan today, who might deny that this massacre ever occurred. As such, Nanking honors the highest calling of documentary filmmaking.
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| 90 |
Time
I have rarely, if ever, seen a documentary reconstruction of a historical event that is so rich in firsthand (and well-preserved) photographic material.
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| 88 |
Boston Globe
Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.
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| 88 |
TV Guide
What Guttentag and Sturman gain in dramatic immediacy, however, they lose when it comes to historical context, and the chance to offer insight into why such things occur in the first place -- and continue to happen today -- is lost.
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| 83 |
Christian Science Monitor
Nanking, directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, does justice to this tragedy even though it makes the mistake of mixing the testimony of actual participants with staged readings from actors subbing for real people.
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| 80 |
Salon.com
Nanking both calls attention to a horrifying set of war crimes that remains little known in the West and crafts an impossible-but-true hymn to the power of the individual conscience.
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| 80 |
Variety
The horrific 1937-38 massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during the early days of the Japanese occupation gets a polished presentation in Nanking.
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| 80 |
The New York Times
What makes the film bearable is the knowledge that a few people did what they could to hold the line against humanity’s worst instincts. The voices in Nanking speak for the persistence of good in times and places where a moral crevice opens to reveal a vision of hell on earth.
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| 75 |
New York Post
Everyone knows about the Holocaust, but few today have heard about what was infamous as the Rape of Nanking, when 200,000 residents of what was then China's capital were massacred by invading Japanese troops.
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| 75 |
New York Daily News
It is the devastating testimony from survivors themselves that leaves the most indelible impression.
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| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
The stories are harrowing, and because they are delivered by living, breathing witnesses, they move us in deep ways that the archival footage, for all its horror, cannot.
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| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
Sid Smith
Whatever the numbers, testimony cited in Nanking portrays the episode as a horrifying chapter in man’s renowned inhumanity to man.
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| 70 |
Film Threat
Jeremy Mathews
While at times the film begins to feel like a laundry list of bad deeds, the first-person accounts pack a wallop.
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| 70 |
Village Voice
Michelle Orange
While the footage and survivors of Nanking are gray and decaying, its unbearable story is not something out of the past; the evil and ignorance it describes are alive and thriving today.
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| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A handsome documentary on a brutal subject.
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| 60 |
Chicago Reader
Individually these elements are powerful, but they fail to mesh or collide with one another in any satisfying way, and the movie's score only exacerbates the problem.
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