ViewGuide

Created Jan 25, 2012 09:20PM PST • Edited Jan 27, 2021 06:05PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   A Film Unfinished shows more death – literal, real death – than perhaps any other movie. Comprised of footage the Nazis shot for a staged documentary of the Warsaw Ghetto, it is an essential Holocaust movie because it’s real, contemporaneous and shows how the Nazis forced the Jews to live in deathly conditions.

   Beware, many scenes are profoundly sad, literally hold-your-head-in-your-hand horrifying. When you think it’s done getting to you, when you’re kinda happy to be jaded, slave laborers start sliding emaciated corpses down a wooden board into a mass grave, and the sadness comes down like a wave, smothering the awe.

4. Acting

   Perfect 5.0

   Real footage of life in the ghetto, albeit much of it staged to make it appear normal, can’t help but be perfect.

5. Male Stars Perfect 5.0

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

7. Female Costars Perfect 5.0

8. Male Costars Perfect 5.0

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    Yael Hersonski deserves enormous acclaim for creating this important documentary from rescued film.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Very Good 3.5

13. Music OK 2.5

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.6

17. Sex Innocent 1.3

18. Violence Savage 4.1

19. Rudeness Salty 2.4

21. Reality

    Natural 1.0

    Jews in the ghetto were forced to give up a core Jewish value – treating life as sacred. That brings to mind Stalin’s infamous quote that “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Jews during the Holocaust were forced to live and die as statistics.

    A Film Unfinished restores many Holocaust victims to their rightful status of human tragedies.

    Mitzvahs get no greater.

22. Circumstantial Natural 1.0

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0