From Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review of Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul: “There is no way in which the film (or a hundred films) could represent the breadth of the communal suffering in the [Auschwitz-Birkenau death] camp. All we can hope for is that the experience — the literal viewpoint — of a single witness can be added to the record. By homing in on Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), and on the range of response in his dark eyes, we are made so aware of the monstrosities around him that we do not need to have them spelled out. Bare dead bodies are glimpsed, often fleetingly, at the sides of the frame. The newcomers, who are told that hot soup and a shower await them, and who are then stripped and herded toward the gas chambers, with the help of the Sonderkommando, are seldom in focus, and the same is true of the corpses borne to the furnaces. This strikes me as merciful and right. The question is not one of taste but of imaginative modesty; to watch most feature films — as opposed to documentaries — about the Holocaust, even those as expert as Schindler’s List, is to be left with a lasting moral queasiness about the limits of dramatic reconstruction. Just because you can attempt a thorough depiction of a death camp doesn’t mean that you should; if your audience goes away convinced that it now knows what went on at Auschwitz, you’ve done something wrong. That is why I admire the judiciousness of Nemes. He gives us only shards.”