Z is a hell of an exciting movie, and it carries you along, though when it's over and you've caught your breath you know perfectly well that its techniques of excitation could as easily be used by a smart Fascist filmmaker, if there was one.

| Jul 6, 2022

It is a great film for many reasons, not the least of which is that it can be enjoyed as a political thriller as well as a political statement.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 18, 2013

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Z is indeed, per Pauline Kael's prominent quote in the press materials, "intolerably exciting." It's also, in a good many ways, intolerable.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Nov 17, 2011

It's hard to overstate the impact that this Oscar-winning procedural thriller had in 1969, on a world roiling in political activism, repression, and discord.

| Jan 15, 2010

It's still an eye-catching, fast-paced watch.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 26, 2009

Z, whose title is a stand-in for the Greek word zei ('he lives'), takes us back to where that fascination all began for Costa-Gavras and shows us that, for the rest of us, it hasn't ever really ended.

Full Review | Jul 10, 2009

In its slick cinematic urgency and its outrage, Z still has the power to shake you up.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 23, 2009

Z combines the intellectual heft of revolution-themed films like The Battle of Algiers with the drop-dead cool of mod touchstones like Blow Out or Le Samoura.

| Mar 13, 2009

Fascism has been driven underground, but a dose of Costa-Gavra's electrifyingly brutal 1969 political thriller Z will rattle you all the same.

| Mar 11, 2009

The military junta that ensued in Greece gave the film a sense of urgency approved by Cannes and Oscar alike.

| Mar 10, 2009

A punchy political pic [from the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos] that mixes action, violence, and conspiracy on a robust, lavish scale.

| Feb 20, 2008

The recreation of the murder and the subsequent investigation uses the techniques of an American thriller to gripping effect, though conspiracies are so commonplace nowadays that it's hard to imagine the impact it made at the time.

| Jun 24, 2006

It is a film of our time. It is about how even moral victories are corrupted. It will make you weep and will make you angry. It will tear your guts out.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

The usual excuse for films like this is that the crude melodrama helps communicate important political ideas and historical information, but Z doesn't communicate anything.

| Jan 1, 2000