100
San Francisco Chronicle
The movie feels more like a thriller and a mystery than a documentary. Perhaps someday, someone will be inspired to dramatize this astonishing story.
The Flat
Critic Rating
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When filmmaker Aaron Goldfinger’s grandmother passes away at the age of 98, the entire family arrives to clear out her flat in Tel Aviv. But the objects, pictures, letters and documents they find begin to reveal traces of a troubled and unknown past in this riveting documentary about secrets, denial, and hope.
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What are critics saying?
100
San Francisco Chronicle by Leba Hertz
The movie feels more like a thriller and a mystery than a documentary. Perhaps someday, someone will be inspired to dramatize this astonishing story.
91
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
I will salute the deftness and intelligence with which Goldfinger observes the reactions of the living to the revelations of the dead.
90
Village Voice
In families, this fascinating film suggests, acknowledging or denying the darker truths of one's legacy is a choice that must be made again and again, each and every day.
90
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
A film that begins as a family quest but evolves into a gripping study of know-don't-tell reticence and the umbilical tie of a lost homeland.
90
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
What makes The Flat mesmerizing is its wealth of historical detail. What makes it universal is what it says about families everywhere - that children, being children, don't want to know what their parents are up to, and that grown-ups, being human, don't want to credit troubling facts that conflict with what they need to believe.
90
Village Voice by Chuck Wilson
In families, this fascinating film suggests, acknowledging or denying the darker truths of one's legacy is a choice that must be made again and again, each and every day.
88
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Is something being hidden? No. It's more that something doesn't want to be known.
88
Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan
A quietly brilliant study in cognitive dissonance, The Flat is a documentary look at Holocaust denial, but not the kind you might think.
83
Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer
Goldfinger happened upon a story far larger than he must have anticipated. The Flat is about the persistence of denial, and of hope.
80
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
No definitive answers are possible to the questions The Flat raises, which makes them all the more provocative.
80
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Ultimately, this is not a film about one specific event but about human nature - most notably, the instincts toward denial and delusion, acceptance and forgiveness. From start to finish, revelations abound.
63
Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier
Accusation is the rhetoric of outrage, and Arnon Goldfinger can't bring himself to experience even conservative anger, regardless of its appropriateness.
40
Time Out
The Flat details his efforts to understand this unusual situation, and although the film suggests that his relatives may have maintained this odd friendship as a denial of their homeland's betrayals, there's only so deep Goldfinger can dig.
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