52
The Look of Silence feels more like an extended DVD extra to his genre-defying previous film than a stand-alone documentary.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
90
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
The Look of Silence is perhaps even more riveting for focusing on one man’s personal search for answers as he bravely confronts his brother’s killers.
100
Compared to "The Act of Killing," Oppenheimer's technique with The Look of Silence is deceptively simple, but it applies a more traditional style of documentary storytelling to extraordinary goals.
100
So involving is the raw content of The Look of Silence that some might view its formal elegance as mere luxury, yet the film reveals Oppenheimer to be a documentary stylist of evolving grace and sophistication.
50
Slant Magazine by James Lattimer
If The Look of Silence still remains a gripping, vital, consequential documentary, it's in spite of its approach rather than because of it.
100
The film does not stab as deeply in laying bare the schizoid moral hypocrisy of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as its peerless predecessor, but instead offers an extraordinarily poignant, desperately upsetting meditation on the legacy of those killings, and on the bravery required to seek any kind of truth about them.
100
Oppenheimer's first film maintained a passive detachment, allowing the killers to re-enact their own atrocities and metaphorically hang themselves with their own words. The Look of Silence takes a far harder line, probing the killers more deeply and confronting them in an attempt to shake some sense of remorse out of them.
100
A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place.
100
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.
80
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
This is an essential companion piece to Oppenheimer’s earlier film; another astonishing heart-of-darkness voyage into the jungle of human nature.