Average Rating: 8.7/10
Reviews Counted: 35
Fresh: 34 | Rotten: 1
Director Lewis Milestone's brilliant anti-war polemic, headlined by an unforgettable performance from Lew Ayres, lays bare the tragic foolishness at the heart of war.
Average Rating: 7.8/10
Critic Reviews: 5
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 0
Director Lewis Milestone's brilliant anti-war polemic, headlined by an unforgettable performance from Lew Ayres, lays bare the tragic foolishness at the heart of war.
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Average Rating: 3.8/5
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One of the most powerful anti-war statements ever put on film, this gut-wrenching story concerns a group of friends who join the Army during World War I and are assigned to the Western Front, where their fiery patriotism is quickly turned to horror and misery by the harsh realities of combat. Director Lewis Milestone pioneered the use of the sweeping crane shot to capture a ghastly battlefield panorama of death and mud, and the cast, led by Lew Ayres, is terrific. It's hard to pick a favorite
Aug 24, 1930 Wide
Jan 5, 1999
MCA Universal Home Video
All Critics (35) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (36) | Rotten (1) | DVD (8)
From such grisly materials the popular cinema is rarely drawn. The film is monumental in the courage that risked its manufacture.
Top CriticA harrowing, gruesome, morbid tale of war.
Deserves its reputation as a classic.
Messrs. Milestone, Abbott and Anderson in this film have contributed a memorable piece of work to the screen.
All Quiet on the Western Front is the definitive World War I motion picture, the best of a surprisingly small class of movies.
The rawness of the audio eradicates any lingering notion that war is romantic or exciting, and at times suggests the very battered eardrums of those engaged in combat.
The despair-and the artistry-is breathtaking.
Took an opportunity to question warfare and its civility long before the war protest film became popular in the 70s. It's dated, obviously, but still powerful.
A movie of timeless relevance and effects. Lew Ayres would never again equal his performance in this film version of the well-known anti-war novel.
Classic anti-war epic tells dire, exhausting tale.
Despite a little dating around the edges this is a truly superb example of its genre and a cinema classic.
A a film that remains one of the most powerful screen comments on the horrors of war.
The film's centerpiece battle runs only eight minutes, yet its hellfire feels twice as long as Saving Private Ryan's D-Day onslaught.
The film made Ayres a star.
...a bitter indictment of the insulated powers that induce naive young men to kill one another.
An ambitious epic of tremendous sweep and scope.
This uncompromising drama makes a bleak statement of war fighting in trenches, stressing the inanity of WWI (or any war) for both sides; perhaps the most memorable moment is the one in which Lew Ayres reaches out for a butterfly to disastrous effect.
There are few war films that can match the brilliance of Lewis Milestone's anti-war classic. It's a feast for the ears with a passionate soul.
The film's strength now derives less from its admittedly powerful but highly simplistic utterances about war as waste, than from a generally excellent set of performances (Ayres especially) and an almost total reluctance to follow normal plot structure.
Based on a novel and probably one of the most realistic war films I have ever seen, WW1 is the setting for this unusual look at life for German troops at the front line. Unusual because its a 30's American film focusing on German soldiers and not the more obvious Allies of Britain, France and Russia.Starting off much
December 10, 2011Super Reviewer
All Quiet on the Western Front is probably the most truthful and one of the best war films of all time, and a true tear jerker.
March 23, 2011
Super Reviewer
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