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Nanking
THINKFilm


9.4

based on 16 reviews
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based on 5 votes
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Internet Movie Database

MPAA RATING: R for disturbing images and descriptions of wartime atrocities, including rape

Starring Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, Jurgen Prochnow, and Stephen Dorff

Nanking is a powerful reminder of the heartbreaking toll that war takes on the innocent, and a testament to the courage and conviction of a few individuals determined to act in the face of evil. The film tells the story of the Japanese invasion of Nanking, China in the early days of World War II and focuses on the efforts of a small group of unarmed Westerners who established a safety zone where over 200,000 Chinese found refuge. The events of the film are told through deeply moving interviews with Chinese survivors, archival footage, and the chilling testimonies of Japanese soldiers, interwoven with staged readings of the Westerners' letters and diaries as performed by Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, Jurgen Prochnow, and Stephen Dorff, among others. (THINKFilm)

GENRE(S):	Documentary
WRITTEN BY:	Bill Guttentag Dan Sturman
DIRECTED BY:	Bill Guttentag Dan Sturman
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: April 29, 2008 Theatrical: December 12, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	88 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Color / Black and White
LANGUAGE(S):	Japanese / Mandarin / English

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

The Hollywood Reporter James Greenberg

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.

Time Richard Schickel

I have rarely, if ever, seen a documentary reconstruction of a historical event that is so rich in firsthand (and well-preserved) photographic material.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.

TV Guide Ken Fox

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.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

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.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

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.

Variety Justin Chang

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.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

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.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

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.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

It is the devastating testimony from survivors themselves that leaves the most indelible impression.

San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

A handsome documentary on a brutal subject.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 9.4 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Harris L. gave it a9:
Saw this deeply moving and difficult documentary on Christmas Eve. And a movie depicting the slaughter of several hundred thousand Chinese by invading Japanese seems hardly the move to see on Christmas Eve. But the courage and clear moral choices made by 20 westerners to do what they could to save the lives of innocent victims of war, rape and oppression answered for me better than anything else I've seen this holiday season the question "What would Jesus do?" He'd have stayed behind, as every other western national fled, to take a moral stand against brutality and war. Hard to watch but a reminder about how people can make a profoundly moral decision to stand up, and back against, the force of evil. I highly recommend this film.

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Nanking THINKFilm

Nanking
THINKFilm