Karen B Williams If you think that you understand the scope of the German atrocities committed during WWII, even if you have been to the Holocaust Museum, unless you have seen this film, you likely do not. With footage much of which had not seen publicly before this 2014 documentary, this film chronicles the liberation of prison and death camps as filmed by British, American, and Soviet army photographers, as well as the healing of the survivors after liberation, and the prosecution of those who managed the death camp industry. The title comes from the narration, "Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But by God's grace, we who live will learn." A must-see film to understand the catastrophic consequences that hate and bigotry can bring.

franscott-07097 This has made me think of something that never occurred to me watching other documentaries of the holocaust. These tragic victims were disposed of without ceremony or dignity; each was an individual and when we think of the unthinkable events of this time the numbers of victims are too enormous to encompass, I mourn them all and yet as one person I cannot do enough to honour to six million. Could there be some way that we could have a worldwide movement to have individuals adopt one victim - if possible to know their birthday and date of death, to undertake to honour that one person in whatever way they might honour a friend or relative who had died. As one reviewer said this is about Jewish people but also intellectuals, homosexuals, gypsies - if six million people across the world were all honouring and remembering one of the victims, as time passes might we not do more to prevent night from falling again.

IOBdennis Last night I watched a documentary I had recorded previously on HBO: "Night Will Fall". It is a documentary of the filming of the macabre consequences after the Holocaust by Alfred Hitchcock (and Billy Wilder secondarily). It is positively harrowing. As a film, it isn't well put together. Like another reviewer here, I couldn't rate the film itself higher because I just didn't think it was assembled very well.It has a sub-text in which the British and Americans vie over the making of the actual documentary which isn't told very well. It's scattered, superficial, and in the long-run rather pointless. But as for its major subject matter, the extermination of so many men, women, and children, it is relentless. It is brutally blunt, and in that there's a point: how the hell can you put together images of such atrocities artistically? You can only record (document) the horror. I cannot get those images out of my head.

Movie Geek The footage shown in this documentary is really excruciating... And it goes on and on and on. The film never really shies away from showing you the horrors of hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies in concentration camps being dragged across and piled up one of top of the others as if they were just mannequins. It's a nightmare-inducing vision that I don't think I will ever be able to erase from my memory. Mountain of personal objects, spectacles even human hair carefully sorted according to type and colours. And yet after a while I felt it was all beginning to be a little too much and I thought the film was probably going around in a circle and did not really have a lot more to say other than just showing detail over detail of the horror. Not that there is anything to say about the carnage that took place in those places, but somehow I felt this was probably a 40/50 minutes or so film stretched to 1 hour and 15 minutes. Yes the footage found is an incredible discovery and a terrifying testimony of a past that shouldn't be forgotten, but other than that, the film has very very little else to say. I also felt some of the use of the interviewees was a bit heavy-handed: cut to people staring into the void, or the use of pointless bit of dialogue just for the sake of seeing this people breaking down into tears half way through the phrase... There wasn't really any need for that. The original footage was heartbreaking enough without having to resort to people crying to make us the audience feel sad about it... or to dark ominous music. But that's just a question of taste. It's hard to review a documentary like this. Give it a small rating and you can be accused of being insensitive. But that's when you should really make a distinction between the subject matter and the material being shown and the actual craft of the documentary. The later is rather plodding, uneven, and as I said before a bit heavy-handed, but since the subject matter is so powerful, on balance 7 out 10 is perfectly justifiable.