Village Voice by Nick Schager

More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema's capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

Presenting a terrifying view of a hidden holocaust and a moral apocalypse in which the most basic humanities have become twisted beyond recognition, The Act of Killing is a towering achievement in filmmaking, documentary or otherwise.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

It is a gut-churning film: and a radical dive into history, grabbing the past in a way a conventional documentary would not.

The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

By tackling one man’s sense of right and wrong (or lack thereof), Oppenheimer is ultimately tackling human nature.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

The horror of The Act of Killing does not dissipate easily or yield to anything like clarity.

Slate by Dana Stevens

Among the most profound, formally complex, and emotionally overpowering documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s also, by turns and sometimes at once, luridly seductive and darkly comic and physically revolting — a movie that makes you want to laugh and cry and retch and run out of the theater, both to escape the awful things the film is showing you and to tell everyone you know that they need to see it, too.

New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme

The cumulative impact is devastating, and very far from a simple Western condemnation of another country’s brutality. In forcing viewers to hear the boasts of genocide’s perpetrators, The Act of Killing puts a harsh spotlight on all celebrations of bloodshed, from Hollywood to the op-ed pages.

RogerEbert.com by Steven Boone

This masterpiece about propaganda, cinema and vanity as instruments of power and terror ends on an excruciatingly sustained, righteous money shot: a monster who could have been a good man suffocates on the truth.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

This feature-length documentary, currently entering national release, may be one of the most horrifying films you'll ever see, and one of the most edifying.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Playing make believe with murderers, Oppenheimer risks the possibility of empowering them. However, by humanizing psychopathic behavior, The Act of Killing is unparalleled in its unsettling perspective on the dementias associated with dictatorial extremes.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

The resulting film is bizarre to the point of ­trippiness, yet it’s one of the most lucid portraits of evil I’ve ever seen.

Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker

In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

Variety by Peter Debruge

Never before has anyone made a documentary like The Act of Killing, and the filmmakers seem at a loss in terms of how to organize the many threads of what they capture...Still, essential and enraging, The Act of Killing is a film that begs to be seen, then never watched again.

Film.com

The most gut-wrenching 'making of' documentary ever made.

The New Yorker by Anthony Lane

The project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer.