Critic Reviews

Intolerance is thrilling and vital, a collision of historical periods that feels as earth-shaking as the movement of tectonic plates.

Probably the most influential of all silent films after The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance launched ideas about associative editing that have been essential to the cinema ever since, from Soviet montage classics to recent American experimental films. And in the use of crosscutting and action to generate suspense, the film's climax hasn't been surpassed.

Intolerance may not be perfect, but with such gargantuan spectacle and timeless mastery of form on show, it is nigh on impossible not to be swept up by this centruy-spanning extravanganza and its medium-shaping impact.

It may seem flawed in a number of ways to some people but this is monumental cinema and essential viewing for true film enthusiasts.

A powerful humane statement and a towering work of art.

The pure, simple love between couples is threatened by other people’s ignorance throughout D.W. Griffith’s film epic Intolerance.

One of the great breakthroughs—the Ulysses of the cinema—and a powerful, moving experience in its own right.

As a medium for expressing art, moving pictures may not stand the test of time, but Intolerance is greater than any medium. It is one of the mileposts on the long road of art, where painting and sculpture and literature and music go jostling eagerly along together.

D.W. Griffith's epic celebration of the potentialities of the film medium--perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history.

The plunging and roving camera provides visceral thrills; ecstatic special effects capture the sacred (the Crucifixion) and the profane (combat in the Great War); a metaphysical framing device (starring Lillian Gish) raises human conflict to universal import; and Griffith’s trademark closeups lend a quivering lip or a trembling hand the tragic grandeur of historical cataclysm.