Critic Reviews
96
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
positive
15(94%)
mixed
1(6%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 16 Critic Reviews
100
The film would be exciting to watch even completely silent, both because it’s a valuable record of Soviet city life at the end of the 1920s, and because it explodes with visual ideas.
100
The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation.
100
No other film – not even by Georges Méliès at his most fantastic – trumpets early cinema's status as a magical science and scientific magic, quite so loudly or melodically.
100
This is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be.
100
It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it.
100
Vertov’s experimental essay proclaims its ‘complete separation from the language of theatre and literature’ in the opening titles. What follows is cinema in its purest form: movement, sensation, action and visual trickery.
100
It's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience.
100
It's a startlingly avant-garde cross-examination of modern life, as well as a lesson in the power of filmmaking and an autopsy of its methods.
100
Silent stunner.
100
Excited with the possibilities of the relatively young film medium, Russia's Dziga Vertov took to the streets of Moscow, Odessa and Kiev to give us a portrait of an ever-changing world that is more essay than documentary. It's a 1929 silent film that added its punctuation in the lab - jump cuts, dissolves, split screens, etc. - to create an indelible work in cinema history. [13 Apr 2017, p.E8]
