In German. 105 minute running time so a good length. I really liked Glazer’s previous movies, Sexy Beast and Under the Skin, so I was excited to see this Holocaust movie centered on the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. Unfortunately it didn’t work, it was too abstracted, too art-house.

Yes, I know Glazer wanted to keep the violence off screen and just hint at it with constant background gunshots and yelling and trains chugging and furnaces roaring and chimneys billowing smoke. But that got repetitive and quickly lost its effect.

Anyone who has seen Son of Saul knows that that was a Holocaust movie done the right way … it is breathtaking and a must-see. Zone of Interest can’t hold a candle to it.

Mick LaSalle was right to say: “it’s less a movie than a misguided work of conceptual art.”

Dick Brody correctly called Zone of Interest “an extreme form of Holokitsch.”

I agree with Manohla Dargis who says the movie is “a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise.”

And I’ll give the final word to Nicolas Rapold: “It must be said that the banality of the Höss family and the bureaucracy of genocide are no revelation, and there’s something wrongheaded in Glazer’s cold replication of their murderous perspective and peekaboo roundabout glimpses of the Nazi atrocity.”