★★★★★ OUT 9 FEBRUARY CINEMAS
This film unfolds a portrait of a city whose spaces harbour ghosts of past barbarities
From 12 Years a Slave to the richly textured Small Axe anthology, director Steve McQueen’s historical testimonials brim with ambition and resonance. Yet even by those standards, the director delivers something unprecedented with this 262-minute mix of documentary and psychogeography, contemplating Germany’s World War Two occupation of Amsterdam by way of the pandemic. Inspired by his wife Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, McQueen combines footage of the Netherlands capital circa lockdown with voiceover accounts of wartime horrors.