96
Metascore
16 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The DissolveNoel MurrayThe DissolveNoel MurrayThe 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.
- 100The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawThe combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation.
- 100The Irish TimesTara BradyThe Irish TimesTara BradyNo 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.
- 100The Observer (UK)Jonathan RomneyThe Observer (UK)Jonathan RomneyThis is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be.
- 100RogerEbert.comRoger EbertRogerEbert.comRoger EbertIt 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.
- 100Time OutTom HuddlestonTime OutTom HuddlestonVertov’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.
- 100The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsThe A.V. ClubKeith PhippsIt's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience.
- 90Chicago ReaderChicago ReaderJust a little over an hour, it nevertheless towers over film history as an example par excellence of cinema’s ability to communicate in unique and transgressive ways.
- 80The IndependentGeoffrey MacnabThe IndependentGeoffrey MacnabIt is more a film poem, an ode to modernity and a symphony of a city.
- It is a disjointed array of scenes in which the producer, Dziga Vertoff, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention.