40
The stats relayed at the movie's end...almost have more impact than the narrative.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
40
This story is both uplifting and awe-inspiring. It deserves to be told better.
75
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
The film is built from moving, frank interviews with survivors from two families who hid, speaking over and around extensive re-enactments. Passages from the memoir of one family matriarch, Esther Stermer, in many ways the heroine of the tale, also are used as narration.
90
Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein
Add one more extraordinary survival tale to the canon of Holocaust documentaries: No Place on Earth.
65
Although the story is told with narration rather than dialogue, Tobias relies too much on reconstruction. A more inventive melding of documentary and docudrama would have benefited the film, whose most moving scenes all involve real members of the families. A bit more historical and geographic context would also be useful.
63
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
The first-person remembrances hit you where you live, while everything else (including a bland musical score by John Piscitello) often creates the opposite of the intended effect: It keeps you at arm's length from an extraordinary story.
60
The New York Times by Nicolas Rapold
The bare facts of the feat seize the imagination, even if Ms. Tobias’s competent documentary doesn’t quite rise to the challenge.
75
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
A well-crafted documentary variation on "Defiance," Ukrainian Jews saving themselves by going underground -- literally.
67
This story isn’t untold, just largely unknown. It’s a minor point, perhaps, but a sticky one, a needless elision that blurs the all-important question of how memories, and history, must be recounted to endure. One telling is not enough.