Critic Reviews

It’s a vital account of understanding the medium that affects us all, be it film, television, or whatever we watch in the future. Remember the past to prepare for the future. Lucky for us, Five Came Back makes the process enthralling.

Superb. ... The three episodes of Five Came Back run a little over three hours total, but the time goes by like a shot.

A must-see for anybody interested in film, World War II, or great story-telling.

At times, it's almost overwhelming in its detail and varied subject matter, chronicling so many facets of how film and war intertwined during World War II. ... This is a must-see.

A fascinating, thorough history lesson that overcomes its early hiccups to tell a stirring tale well worth a binge.

A somewhat choppy but unavoidably fascinating documentary about five major Hollywood directors. ... Each modern helmer was assigned one of the five veterans, a ploy that succeeds more often than not by virtue of the professional expertise and personal sympathy brought to bear on what their forerunners went through.

Five Came Back does not cover any new territory but puts together the story in a new focus. It is not simply about the filmmakers but about what they saw--the indelible images of war.

Five Came Back aspires to the grandness of a ’40s Hollywood production, with its star lineup, Ms. Streep’s narration, the kind of period animation that adorned Capra’s epic “Why We Fight” and Thomas Newman’s heroic music--which is a bit, shall we say, insistent. But overall, the series is much like its story: mythic, adventurous, romantic. And real.

With its use of archival clips, men talking into the camera and narration by Meryl Streep, Five Came Back might seem like standard documentary filmmaking. But it’s easy to overlook the complexity of its editing, which distills a trove of footage in superbly illustrative ways.

The three-hour-plus documentary is thorough, thoughtful and authoritative, an experience that honors the multiple complexities of this situation and, best of all, helps us feel what these directors felt as they went forward into what was very much terra incognita.