‘Occupied City’ Review: Steve McQueen’s Epic Holocaust Documentary Is a Disquieting Cinematic Essay

Manchester City fans are begging Ilkay Gundogan to sign a new contract after scoring the fastest-ever FA Cup final goal against Manchester United.

Manchester City have a clean bill of health ahead of today's FA Cup final against Manchester United.

Documentary fans might be forgiven for nurturing a dream – that Cannes would follow the recent example of Venice and Berlin and award its top prize to a nonfiction film. Complete the documentary Triple Crown – the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear and the Palme d’or.

Manchester City will look to sign Bayern Munich defender Alphonso Davies if he leaves the German side and could rival Real Madrid for his signature.

The Premier League season may only just have finished but attention is already turning towards next term.

Disney’s return to live-action takes of their animated vault in the fullest theatrical form happens this weekend with Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid which is eyeing a $180M worldwide start.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, Features Jewish Story Partners (JSP), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit film funding organization, has announced  its new slate of grants to 19 documentary film projects. The org, which was launched in April 2021 with support from Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, will distribute $490,000 among these independent films, all of which explore the vast and vibrant terrain of the Jewish storytelling space. The announcement coincides with Jewish American Heritage Month and a commitment from President Joe Biden’s White House administration to develop a national strategy to counter antisemitism and “address increasing awareness and understanding of both antisemitism and Jewish American heritage.” 

Manchester City are reportedly poised to enter the race for Brighton playmaker Alexis Mac Allister.

Manchester City are on the verge of completing the greatest season in the club's history, and maybe even the greatest season in English football history.

French director Justine Triet returns to Competition with a cerebral smash that might finally bring the Best Actress award that its star, Sandra Hüller, was cruelly denied in 2016 when Maren Ade’s festival hit Toni Erdmann lost out in every category. That film wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and the formidably forensic Anatomy of a Fall might not be either, but Hüller’s screen magnetism cannot be denied. Between this and her role as “Queen of Auschwitz” in Jonathan Glazer’s equally brilliant Zone of Interest, Hüller has Cannes in the palm of her hand. Whether she will also get a Palme in her hand is up to the jury.

The title of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest refers to how the Germans labeled the 40-square-kilometer area that surrounded the Auschwitz concentration camp on the outskirts of Oświęcim, Poland. This is where the writer-director has set this unique Holocaust film with a perspective and focus on what was on the other side of a wall separating the most horrific mass murder and terror in human history, and the daily, almost bucolic lives of those who caused it or were in complete denial of it. Yes, Holocaust movies are virtually a genre of their own, but I can safely say I have never seen one, sans any visuals of violence and suffering, that still manages to be just as harrowing and frightening, maybe even more. The Zone of Interest takes its place among the great films made on the Holocaust and will probably haunt you long after seeing it.

Cannes Film Festival features an unusually robust selection of documentaries, two in the Main Competition alone, where nonfiction films almost never appear. And if the ones that have screened in the festival’s first three days have anything in common, it’s scale.

Harry Sloan, the media investor and former CEO of MGM Studios, is among President Joe Biden’s appointees to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Though he is still mostly known for his lyrical, America-set road movie Paris, Texas, which won the Palme d’Or in 1984, Germany’s Wim Wenders does most of his best work when he’s back on home turf. The Berlin Wall, for example, provided the backdrop for his 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire, in which philosophical angels roamed a divided city that was still trying to reckon with the shame of the Second World War. His new documentary, Anselm, is ostensibly the biography of a fellow artist, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to read it as a veiled autobiography, in that its subject isn’t so much a person as the way that life experience and intelligence combine to create art.

Somewhere in the third hour of Steve McQueen’s documentary “Occupied City,” the camera slowly dollies left over a list of names in glowing green print on a black background, enumerating the thousands of Jews deported from Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. A moment of silence in the audio mix announces this as an important shot, an occasion to consider the enormity of the loss that this four-and-a-half-hour film itemizes with near-comprehensive diligence.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Over the past 15 years, Steve McQueen has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s made only a handful of features, but in almost every case he takes a subject of extraordinary magnitude (the 1971 IRA prison hunger strike in “Hunger,” the complex horrors of slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” the collision of gritty city politics and feminine revolt in “Widows,” the epochal crackdown on West Indian immigrants in London in “Mangrove”) and uses it to box open your heart and mind. And he does it all with a storytelling vibrance that’s at once heady and populist. So when it was announced that McQueen would be directing his first documentary feature, and that it would tackle the subject of the Holocaust, dealing with the victims of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam (the city where McQueen now lives), my anticipation took the form of thinking: How, with a director of McQueen’s skill and imagination and gravity, could this be less than fascinating?

In cinematic form, how do you tell history without archive footage? Occupied City shows how it can be done, and to what effect.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Steve McQueen looks stressed out. He’s a few weeks into post-production on “Blitz,” his World War II drama for Apple TV+, while starting promotion on his other, long-gestating wartime project, the documentary “Occupied City.” “It’s definitely pleasurable, but this is work,” declares McQueen with the wariness of a filmmaker who’s just been plucked out of the edit suite. “Hard work is always hard work. You can’t avoid it.” The British director, who was Oscar-nominated for “12 Years a Slave,” didn’t set out to make back-to-back movies about the war, but “you plant seeds, and some come to fruition and others don’t,” he explains. “These two happened to blossom fairly close to each other.”

Former Manchester United midfielder Roy Keane has heaped praise on the 'outstanding' Ilkay Gundogan after the Man City captain starred in Sunday's 3-0 win at Everton.

Eurovision Song Contest viewers thought a key Manchester City star had swapped the football pitch for the stage as they watched the action unfold live on BBC One.