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Level Five

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France · 1997
1h 46m
Director Chris Marker
Starring Catherine Belkhodja, Nagisa Ōshima, Chris Marker
Genre Documentary, Romance, War

Laura, a French computer programmer, inherits the task of making a computer game of the Battle of Okinawa in Japan during World War 2. The extraordinary circumstances of the Battle of Okinawa lead Laura to reflect deeply on her own life and humanity in general, particularly the influence of history and memories.

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What are critics saying?

80

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Its themes are a bit nostalgic and some of its technology looks dated, but there is nothing else in theaters now that feels quite as new.

80

The Dissolve by Adam Nayman

Level Five doesn’t achieve the poetic heights of Sans Soleil, but that might be because its project is more desultory; where the earlier work merely hints at the difficulty of looking at history without a filter, this sister film all but gives up the ghost.

88

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

If you can hook into it, Level Five is not just witty, insinuating, and penetrating; it’s also unexpectedly moving and, as deliberately threadbare as it often looks, cinematically rich.

100

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

By using Laura as an avatar, Marker actually helps us see the visuals and their knotty meanings much more clearly. The more we watch, the more Laura softens, until — in a mind-bending conceit — her very status as a fictional creation is called into question. The effect is ecstatic.

83

The Playlist by Nikola Grozdanovic

The theories in Level Five simultaneously thrive in realms of computer science, ethnography, and cognitive psychology, while the picture remains cloaked by the emotional weight of a historical tragedy that marked an entire nation.

100

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

It humanely, intelligently questions the very nature of our desire to make sense of the past with the tools of the present, when the human mind remains the most aggressively obliterating battlefield of all.

100

Slant Magazine by Steve Macfarlane

Level Five pictorializes the cruel moment when curiosity encounters tragedy, and the all-too-human abandonment of interest that can follows.

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