Directed with a newsreel immediacy and a documentary seriousness, it could be used by young revolutionary groups as a guide to creating the political structure of a resistance movement.

| Aug 9, 2024

I think people's senses are so overwhelmed by the surging inevitability of the action that they are prepared to support what, in another context, they would reject.

| Sep 18, 2023

The lessons The Battle of Algiers has to offer are painfully obvious. Why we still haven't learned them over fifty years hence defies all logic.

| Jul 22, 2023

In terms of the political genre, this one may be among the greatest internationally with its documentary-style shoot...

| Mar 8, 2023

[Director Gillo] Pontecorvo emerged during the "boom" of postwar Italian neorealism, but he was above all a documentary filmmaker. Both strains serve him well in this magnificent work. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 21, 2020

A stirring reminder that all creatures crave liberty, administered by themselves.

| Jun 9, 2020

[Gillo] Pontecorvo is not much different from Mike Nichols and his techniques in the execrable Graduate. But the separating factor is Pontecorvo's artistic sensibility: he knows when enough is enough.

| Jan 31, 2020

One of the finest recreations of dramatic actuality in the history of the cinema - one of those movies which shouldn't be missed.

| Jan 16, 2020

The end result is an epic film achieved through a neorealist and objective technique that makes the entire nation of Algeria into the protagonist. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Jul 26, 2019

What do you want me to say? It's a masterpiece.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 28, 2018

It's a story of a moment in history, but the parallels to the current global climate of terrorism feel as if this movie was culled from today's headlines.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 1, 2018

This movie is packed with so much glamour and carnage you won't believe it's a documentary about one man.

| Aug 23, 2017

The continued relevance of The Battle of Algiers is both a point of fascination and something to mourn.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 2, 2017

A thrillingly realistic re-enactment of true events...

| Jan 10, 2017

Pontecorvo's fictional documentary classic of the mechanics of terrorism and counterterrorism is a tense, crack thriller and one of the greatest films to draw a portrait of both sides of urban conflict.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Oct 12, 2016

It uses realism as an effect, documentary as a style. You feel that you're really there, and you can't help but be moved.

| Oct 5, 2016

It neither demonizes nor lionizes either side of the conflict, aiming for just-the-ugly facts objectivity. Nobody who sees it is likely to feel comforted, or even vindicated. The emotion it most frequently and fervently inspires is sorrow.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 5, 2016

The film is not just a relentlessly gripping entertainment but also a cinematic Rorschach blot, a moral miasma that tosses our sympathies this way and that.

| Sep 29, 2016

Its content has classic and tragic dimensions beyond politics.

| Jan 18, 2013

Essential viewing.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2012