It's a compelling journey into a soul-chilling past that might not be fully sorted out for generations to come.

Its lack of both style and focus keeps it from being a success as a feature film.

The Rape of Europa presents iconic images that viewers who aren't schooled in European art will recognize. That's a good way to connect with the film and understand the enormity of the pillage by Hitler and his cronies.

The movie's three directors sap the drama out of the story with slow pacing, a dispassionate accumulation of facts and a too-dry narration by Joan Allen.

Narrated by Joan Allen, the film is a remarkably comprehensive look at the cultural destruction that accompanied the slaughter.

This is a vast subject, ideally suited to a series of films. It's at its most moving when focusing on the small stories of individual artworks taken from their owners and restored to the families decades later.

(T)his dense, dynamic documentary... takes on the high drama and difficult moral quandaries of Adolf Hitler's campaign to plunder the great artworks of Europe...