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100Like all masterpieces, it speaks to later ages as powerfully and intelligently as to its own.
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100An extraordinary movie that ruffled many feathers when it first came out. Almost 40 years later, it retains the poignancy it delivered back then. Its message is not lost in our present state of affairs.
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100It's a masterpiece.
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100The Battle of Algiers is a thinking person's action film in which there are winners -- but no heroes.
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100The movie is a marvel - bold, lucid and succinct (even at 123 minutes). It's also harrowing and moving in its depiction of noncombatant men, women and children caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism.
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100The film's proudest boast is that nary a frame comes from documentary footage...Every riot, every explosion, every seemingly spontaneous gundown in the streets of Algiers was staged, then shot in black-and-white stock that intentionally echoes newsreel footage.
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100Has a vigour, a commitment and an intelligence that is absent from too much modern cinema.
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100Achieves its success through a combination of attitude and technique, uniting, to exceptional effect, a way of viewing the world morally while looking at it physically.
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100It's one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling.
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91Nearly four decades ago, Pontecorvo anatomized the very form of modern terrorist warfare: the hidden cells, the cultish leaders, the brutish cycle of attack and counterattack.
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90What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway--the sense that ALL sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.
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90A classic of politically engaged filmmaking, based on a book by Saadi Yacef, a former FLN leader who also produced the picture and played a version of himself.
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90A prototype of news-footage realism, the film makes shrewd use of handheld sloppiness, misjudged focus, overexposure, and you-are-there camera upset; the payoff is the scent of authentic panic.
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90This astonishingly gritty film maintains its strong niche between Roberto Rossellini's "Open City" and Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday" as a pinnacle of war-torn neo-realist drama.
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90The greatness of The Battle of Algiers lies in its ability to embrace moral ambiguity without succumbing to it.
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83The French are very much the villains of the saga and, naturally, have always hated the movie (it was banned in Paris until 1971); and it remains controversial in other quarters as well because it seems to embrace, even celebrate, terrorism as a political tool.
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80What makes the movie's power creditable is Pontecorvo's ability to present combatants on both sides as multidimensional, nonheroic human beings, even though it's obvious where the director's own sentiments lie. (Review of original release)
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80It's a dedicated effort with importance as a 'document.' (Review of original release)
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80Whatever the news-linked reasons for its revival, Pontecorvo's film is wonderfully worth seeing, or re-seeing, for its own sake.
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It's back in a handsome new black-and-white print, and it's still powerful stuff -- you can see why Pauline Kael wrote that it was "probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people."