Pontecorvo essentially established the cinematic language that we recognize in recent dramas based on actual events, from Bloody Sunday to Black Hawk Down.
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03/26/04
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Battle of Algiers (1966)
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Reviews Counted:68
Fresh:67
Rotten:1
Average Rating:9/10
Consensus: A powerful, documentary-like examination of the response to an occupying force, The Battle of Algiers hasn't aged a bit since its release in 1966.
Runtime: 2 hrs 5 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Box Office: $188,820
Synopsis: Gillo Pontecorvo's presents a harrowing, documentary-style depiction of the Algerian's people's struggle to liberate themselves from France between 1954 and 1962. The film creates a stunning... [More]
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Reviews for Battle of Algiers
Top CriticStill powerful and upsetting because of its unpolished immediacy ... and because the movie declines to judge the terrorists' actions.
03/25/04
Gripping and technically dazzling documentary-style drama.
03/25/04
The price of invasion has never been more poignantly spelled out than in this classic film.
03/21/04
Perhaps the finest political film of the 1960s.
03/19/04
Magnificent moviemaking.
03/04/04
It’s more disturbing now than ever.
03/01/04
The chafing, mutually uncomprehending collision of Western occupiers and Muslim occupied has never been captured with such dispassionate, thrilling clarity.
02/27/04
gripping, relevant cinema...Irish film, "Bloody Sunday," borrowed its entire structure from "Algiers."
02/18/04
Few movies have done such an eloquent, evenhanded job of defining the conflict between colonialists and natives determined to free themselves from foreign rule.
02/13/04
The director's real achievement is not in making a piece of agitprop but in using these fundamental tools of cinema in such an extraordinarily affecting way.
02/13/04
A startling and still-potent view of the double standard of war.
02/13/04
The verity of a documentary...with the narrative drive and emotional charge of a great thriller
02/11/04
plays like a mesmerizing action thriller that derives from the best traditions of Hollywood.
01/23/04
This lesson in modern warfare is not only instructive to the Pentagon's military but is of considerable value to any generation's fascination with law, order, anarchic behavior and classic story-telling technique.
01/12/04
a lesson in modern warfare
01/09/04
The greatness of The Battle of Algiers lies in its ability to embrace moral ambiguity without succumbing to it.
01/09/04
The 'smell of truth' that Pontecorvo said he was after in this film has never left it, and likely never will.
01/08/04
Top CriticLike all masterpieces, it speaks to later ages as powerfully and intelligently as to its own.
01/08/04
A classic of politically engaged filmmaking.
01/08/04
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