Metacritic reviews

Not only is the film a powerful historical record and a warning for future generations, it is an essential reminder to people, including many in Japan today, who might deny that this massacre ever occurred. As such, Nanking honors the highest calling of documentary filmmaking.

I have rarely, if ever, seen a documentary reconstruction of a historical event that is so rich in firsthand (and well-preserved) photographic material.

What Guttentag and Sturman gain in dramatic immediacy, however, they lose when it comes to historical context, and the chance to offer insight into why such things occur in the first place -- and continue to happen today -- is lost.

The horrific 1937-38 massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during the early days of the Japanese occupation gets a polished presentation in Nanking.

What makes the film bearable is the knowledge that a few people did what they could to hold the line against humanity’s worst instincts. The voices in Nanking speak for the persistence of good in times and places where a moral crevice opens to reveal a vision of hell on earth.

Nanking both calls attention to a horrifying set of war crimes that remains little known in the West and crafts an impossible-but-true hymn to the power of the individual conscience.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust, but few today have heard about what was infamous as the Rape of Nanking, when 200,000 residents of what was then China's capital were massacred by invading Japanese troops.

It is the devastating testimony from survivors themselves that leaves the most indelible impression.

While at times the film begins to feel like a laundry list of bad deeds, the first-person accounts pack a wallop.

While the footage and survivors of Nanking are gray and decaying, its unbearable story is not something out of the past; the evil and ignorance it describes are alive and thriving today.