The Last Days

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. Read full review

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

The Last Days is full of children and grandchildren. This idea of regeneration is a common thread that connects the stories of the five survivors, and provides the documentary with its unexpected warmth and redemptive power. [05 Mar 1999, p.51]

An unforgettable and profoundly inspiring film. [05 Mar 1999, p.04]

It's a gut-wrenching emotional experience that you'll watch with tears in your eyes. [26 Mar 1999]

Inevitably, The Last Days has its moments of pain. There are just enough glimpses of the camps (some in color) to remind us of the shocking physical conditions. But the sense of dignity these people convey, their resilience in the face of evil, their implicit acceptance of this traumatic and transforming experience, is truly inspirational. [26 Mar 1999]

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. Read full review

What these five and others have to say may be familiar to many by now, but the experiences they lived through are so terrible and told in such riveting detail it’s as if you’re hearing about the Holocaust for the first time. Read full review

The five stories are deftly interwoven by Moll, along with archival footage that puts these stories in contexts of time. [08 Mar 1999]

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

Though the power of some Holocaust documentaries is in part a product of their epic scope and epic running times, The Last Days overwhelms at just 87 minutes. [05 Feb 1999]

What makes The Last Days stand above the many similar films about the Holocaust and its survivors, though, is the fluidity with which Moll structures and passes through his material. In this, he's ably accompanied by Hans Zimmer's eloquent score and the crisp, simple photography of cinematographer Harris Done. [19 Feb 1999]

Powerful as the archival material is, the most loaded footage is of these survivors back on the pain-drenched turf of their Hungarian origins and the blood-drenched soil of the former concentration camps they outlived. Given the moral authority of their presence, the film doesn't need extraneous drama, and wisely avoids it. [26 Feb 1999, p.D4]

The Last Days manages to accomplish something even those other esteemed works do not: It melds meticulous historical accuracy and rare film footage with an achingly human spirit provided by five survivors. And all this is delivered in a fresh, concise manner. [12 Mar 1999, p.E3]

It's an honorable, straightforward, talking-heads-and-old-clips film that sometimes rises to profundity when it touches us deeply. [23 Apr 1999, p.10E]

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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

The Last Days, despite its great subject, is not quite a great non-fiction film. It's too reserved and careful in tone to reach the heights of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. [12 Feb 1999, p.I]

This first-person account of suffering and survival among Hungarian victims of the Holocaust contains much stirring and revealing material, although the conventionality of its style diminishes the freshness and urgency of its content to a degree. [05 Feb 1999, p.14]

This is hatred in its purest form. Not a pretty sight, to be sure, but one that is well worth viewing. [04 Jun 1999, p.24]

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. Read full review

The Last Days' major flaw, perhaps, is its conventionality: It takes us over the same horrific ground in the usual way. The shock is familiar. [26 Mar 1999, p.C6]