“Anyone who thinks that the cinema is dead needs to experience Come and See,” critic Clare Kitson wrote for the London Film Festival. “It's dazzling filmmaking; towering, cathartic. Set in occupied Byelorussia in 1943, it follows a teenage partisan through various horrific encounters until finally the lad finds himself in a village which (along with 620 others in Byelorussia, a credit tells us) the Nazis annihilate by herding all inhabitants into a barn and setting fire to it. The camerawork is tremendous, and isolated images-like the boy waking one foggy morning in a field after a mortar attack, his head resting on a dead cow-stick in the mind. The acting of the young lead, who deteriorates into a middle-aged wreck as a result of the atrocities he witnesses, is immaculate; the handling of crowds spectacular. If you feel up to 142 minutes of raw emotion, you must see this film.”