80
Panh’s commentary – spoken in French by Randal Douc – searingly sets the context.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
91
The Missing Picture might have felt academic, even coldly removed, were it not for its scathing narration, penned by Panh (with Christophe Bataille) and read by Randal Douc.
80
Powerful and mesmerising, this offers an fresh approach to a tough topic.
75
If some elements are more successful than others in achieving a balance between the public and the private, between the story of a nation’s ruination and that of a family’s annihilation, it remains a shocking, poignant and soulful tribute to lives ended and to innocence lost in the country’s notorious Killing Fields.
80
A gripping, fascinating and visually arresting memoir.
80
The film is a brave act of witness complicated by the documaker’s decision to re-create his experiences using clay figurines, a tricky aesthetic device that raises fascinating and problematic questions of representation.
90
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
The Missing Picture is personal and unexpected, a documentary that mixes media in an unusual way to very potent effect.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young
A deliberately distanced but often harrowing vision of a living hell.
75
Slant Magazine by Nick McCarthy
Paramount to molding a narrative of war and totalitarianism, however, is the inventive aesthetic in which Panh frames his memoir: a hypnotic hybrid of bleak archival footage, thoughtful voiceover, tone-dictating music, and—most significantly—homemade clay-figurine dioramas.
80
Time Out London by Trevor Johnston
The effect is talismanic: overlaid by a thoughtful voiceover, it invites the audience to share the pain in a cathartic act of imaginative reclamation.