The Rape of Europa (2007)
Runtime: 1 hr 57 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Screenwriter: Bonni Cohen, Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham
Producer: Bonni Cohen, Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham
Composer: Marco D'Ambrosio
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
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.
It's long for a documentary, almost two hours, but it has a big story to tell.
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...
As thorough as the movie is, it could easily devote another hour to cases like this.
There is a heart-rending feeling to this documentary, in part due to its sense of irretrievable loss.
Filmmakers Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham do a superb job of telling this neglected story in vivid detail.
Renders one of the most arresting untold stories of World War II into something quite unaccountably boring.
This one has focus trouble, canvassing too many countries, too many issues, and the filmmaking is on the ordinary side.
The film is somewhat scattered in construction, but it's an eye-opener.
Hitler's methodical plan to plunder and destroy Europe's great works of art gets lush treatment in this comprehensive documentary.
Not helping matters are Joan Allen's blanched tones as narrator, or the general flatness of the talking heads.
Europa starts to lose its tight focus and becomes a cinematic cataloguing of events across seven countries. Given the moral imperative at the heart of the movie, however, perhaps more is more.
News
posted by Jeff Giles January 11, 2008
If there's one Hollywood awards ceremony that you'd think would be able to go off without a hitch this year, it'd be the...
posted by Jeff Giles November 20, 2007
A little over a week after reporting the names of the dozen films being submitted for Oscar consideration in the...


Top Critic