91
Despite the sound of gunfire off in the distance, Notturno is less a film about life during wartime than the life that subsequently follows it, as those damaged by the violence try to move forward.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
San Francisco Chronicle by Bob Strauss
Rosi endlessly proves that he can turn the region’s agony into the finest art and proves that he hasn’t lost sight of the human factor in the process.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
With a compassionate eye for the downtrodden that has characterized all Gianfranco Rosi’s work, Notturno brings three years of shooting in Middle East war zones to the screen in an impressionistic collage of ordinary people caught up in conflict.
75
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Rosi’s compositions, static and mostly wide angle, are ennobling, albeit ambiguously. Life is going on, but not as usual.
70
It is problematic that many of the film’s most powerful segments are its most prurient, and even more, that they are juxtaposed with the poetic and the prosaic.
70
Access is all in Rosi’s documentaries, and the access he achieves, winning the confidence of his subjects so that it’s as if he isn’t there while filming their most intimate moments, is astonishing. But access has its limits. While our hearts open up to these traumatised kids, being there with them in the room at this delicate moment doesn’t feel quite right.
90
The New York Times by Nicolas Rapold
The past two decades of documentary film have produced many anatomies of history that attempt to summarize several millenniums, but Rosi’s borderless tableaus bring out another kind of truth in faces, places and pure feeling.
88
The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.
67
Austin Chronicle by Richard Whittaker
Rosi seeks to give glimpses of insight, to find emotional truths in the mother keening in the prison cell where her son died, and the courting couple who comment on the imminent rain but ignore the distant sound of machine gun fire. To fill in the contextual gaps would damage those truths, but to leave them inevitably will leave the audience questioning what's outside of his frame.
95
It’s hard to watch Notturno at times, but to the director’s credit it’s also impossible to look away.