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Battle of Algiers, The (re-release)
Rialto Pictures

6.8 based on 20 reviews Read critic reviews How did we calculate this? based on 19 votes Read user comments Rate this movie

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MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Samia Kerbash, Ugo Paletti, and Fusia El Kader

This 1965 film chronicles the Algerian people's struggle to overthrow the French Colonial Government in the mid-1950s.

GENRE(S):	Classic  |  Drama  |  Foreign  |  War
WRITTEN BY:	Gillo Pontecorvo Franco Solinas
DIRECTED BY:	Gillo Pontecorvo
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: September 21, 2004  Video: April 21, 1993  Theatrical: January 9, 2004
RUNNING TIME:	117 minutes, B/W
ORIGIN:	Algeria / Italy
LANGUAGE(S):	French (with English subtitles)

Original title "La Battaglia di Algeri"; Winner, Golden Lion, 1966 Venice Film Festival; Nominated, Best Director and Best Screenplay, 1969 Academy Awards

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Like all masterpieces, it speaks to later ages as powerfully and intelligently as to its own.

100

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Achieves 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.

100

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

It's one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling.

100

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The Battle of Algiers is a thinking person's action film in which there are winners -- but no heroes.

100

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

It's a masterpiece.

100

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The 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.

100

Miami Herald Marta Barber

An 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.

100

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The 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.

100

Empire David Parkinson

Has a vigour, a commitment and an intelligence that is absent from too much modern cinema.

91

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Nearly 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.

90

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

A 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.

90

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

What 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.

90

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

The greatness of The Battle of Algiers lies in its ability to embrace moral ambiguity without succumbing to it.

90

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

This 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.

90

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

A 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.

83

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The 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.

80

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Whatever the news-linked reasons for its revival, Pontecorvo's film is wonderfully worth seeing, or re-seeing, for its own sake.

80

TV Guide Staff (Not Credited)

What 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)

80

Variety Staff (Not Credited)

It's a dedicated effort with importance as a 'document.' (Review of original release)

75

San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego

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."

The average user rating for this movie is 6.8 (out of 10) based on 19 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Pat C. gave it a9:
So immersing that one hardly notices as it shifts between being an action drama and a documentary. Told from the leftist perspective, it invites the viewer to form a political opinion, which is how these things always get started in the first place. But, as history, knowing what happened in Algeria is essential to understanding what is happening now. Blaming the French and wanting to exterminate terrorists have always been no-brainers, and the film almost condones both. The ending is tidy, but the implications are not, so one may find the show awesome and informative without clarifying one's moral compass.

Wael S. gave it a10:
The best I ever saw at my house.

Cian M gave it a10:
Absolute classic. Brilliantly shot in grainy newsreel style. Never more relevant than now with what is happening in Iraq. Atrocities on both sides but in the end colonialism is the loser.

John A. gave it a 10:
An absolutely stunning film. It is gripping from start to finish. The pace is incredible and keeps you on the edge of your seat. The story essentially boils down to the passion of the Algerians versus the efficiency of the French. I imagine this film was not particularly well received in France, but I could be wrong. Several scenes blatantly resemble stormtroopers hunting down Jews. One can very easily argue that the Islamicists politics and seemingly disspasionate murders are reprehensible. However, in one of the most poignant scenes the leader of the FLN says to the French, "We'd gladly trade our baskets for your planes."

Mark B. gave it a 6:
First, the good stuff. This is a fascinating political psuedo-documentary-thriller that puts nearly all so-called TV "docudramas" to shame. The grungy, grainy look of the film adds immeasurably to its veracity; at times it looks like the filmmakers walked all over the print with dirty shoes, just like Orson Welles supposedly did with the newsreel-within-a-film in Citizen Kane. The Battle of Algiers isn't timid about showing the consequences and horrors of violence committed by both sides, and it's careful to provide at least one more or less fully rounded character employed by the French military. That said, I'd still have to place this in the (thankfully) very small category of films led by Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will: films that represent the unholy marriage of totally unassailable filmmaking technique and utterly loathsome, reprehensible content or point of view. Colonialism and forced occupation are bad, to say the least, and I think we all know it, but the filmmakers seem to really believe that this justifies the resistance "heroes" committing acts of terrorism against innocent bystanders and cops who are largely ordinary citizens doing their jobs. (Note in particular the scene in which one member of the police force stops another from searching a Muslim woman's dress out of respect for her religion, and it turns out she was using her clothing to hide a gun that she proceeds to shoot them with.) Last year's excellent, Oscar-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, at least had some of the members of that radical organization questioning some of their "by any means necessary" actions; here you're about as likely to get some sort of tempering or balancing statement as the poor woman who has a "basket bomb" placed under her chair by one of the underground members has a chance of surviving the explosion in less than eighty-seven pieces. (Needless to say, later scenes in which the French military interrogate and torture some of the instigators are understandably presented as horrifying--as they should--rather than with the matter-of-fact tone of the bombings themselves.) Look at it this way: I think we can all agree that the war-related murders of American soldiers, dragging of their bodies, etc. by hostile Iraqis is horrible and anger-provoking, but would that justify somebody making a movie condoning some of our military's torture of Iraqi prisoners? Biggest mystery of all: why is this film being rereleased now in these post 9/11 days? I can only make three guesses: either because of the 50th anniversary of Indochina's liberation of France (discussed in one of the film's most effective scenes),or because the theme of Arab liberation is once again a very topical one, or maybe because the distributor is a bit of a sick puppy!

Yoon Min C.> gave it a 9:
Feverish, impassioned, thrilling.. and manipulative and simplistic. in retrospect, the movie's triumphant 'happy' hollywood ending is the biggest joke of all; as soon as the french left, rival algerians used torture upon one another and the nation swayed from anarchy to brutal authoritarian rule. more an artifact of the political pipedreams of radicals of the era than anything truthful about algeria. worst of all, its pretension of being fairminded makes it sometimes as phony as do the right thing. in some ways, it probably had an influence on some of today's hipsterish attitude among armchair radicals. matrix is battle of algeiers as cgi sci-fi.

Jade B. gave it a 10:
Simply one of the best movies to come out of the 60's. It takes a strong anti-colonialist stance but it does so with fairness and integrity. Beautifully balanced militant film-making.

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