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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
View All The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) News
All Critics (20) | Top Critics (3) | Fresh (16) | Rotten (4) | DVD (4)
Schlöndorff has a tendency to sketch the rest of the cast as simple grotesques or symbols of decadence that are unconvincingly humanized in the final third.
The story it tells is so outsized, bizarre, funny, and eccentric, the movie compels attention.
Walks a taut, high rope between doubles and split selves, docu-realism and surrealism, brutality and naïveté, sacred and profane, and history and myth, without falling into the safety net of childish fantasy. (It only falters in its final half-hour.)
If ever [the characters in] a film embodied Hannah Arendt's principle of "the banality of evil", it's The Tin Drum...
There are many themes running through The Tin Drum: resistance against an unkind world, the need for acceptance, the horrors of romance and war, and the final idea that growth is inevitable and unfortunately, necessary.
In Volker Schlöndorff's restored version of his 1979 classic, Oskar Matzerath emerges as a tragic anti-hero, whose lustful imagination and prodigious magical gifts can't shield him from the juggernaut of war.
The literal adaptation doesn't transfer that well to film.
This movie rests on the small shoulders of David Bennent as 'three-year-old' Oskar Matzerath, and the undersized twelve-year-old comes up wonderful.
Context is everything. Although often mistaken as a black comedy, Volker Schlöndorff's bold adaptation of Günter Grass's abstractly autobiographical 1959 novel is an exemplary model of European magic realist cinema.
Fascinating allegory with war, death themes and little boy who won't grow up.
Technically and stylistically, The Tin Drum is an astounding work. Thematically, it strives for an importance it only sometimes achieves
the film is more memorable for its quirky commingling of the epic and the intimate and its often startling visuals than for any of its big themes
Well made but disturbing.
Super Reviewer
A little German boy decides to stop growing up at 3 and a half years old, then watches as Hitler rises to power. A classic comic nightmare about "little people's" acquiescence to Nazism.
Darkly humor, surrealism and controversial, Die Blechtrommel is a dazzing, entertaning and unique film that bring to us a great direction, just like the screenplay and David Bennent's performance. One of the best films that I ever saw and also one of the most shocking. Fresh.
Mischievous, visually stunning, hilarious and compelling. quite an achievement adapting GÃ 1/4nter Grass' novel.
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