91
Metascore
16 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100Slant MagazineRob HumanickSlant MagazineRob HumanickAnti-war statements of the cinema in the subsequent 80 years have occasionally surpassed Lewis Milestone’s technically and artistically groundbreaking film, but few can match it for relentless despair or elemental fury—both on and off the battlefield.
- 100TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazinePerhaps the greatest antiwar film ever made, holding considerable power even now due to Lewis Milestone's inventive direction.
- 100EmpireIan NathanEmpireIan NathanDespite a little dating around the edges this is a truly superb example of its genre and a cinema classic.
- It is the most thoroughgoing exposé of the absurdity of war, and the most explicitly pacifist movie ever made.
- Often the scenes are of such excellence that if they were not audible one might believe that they were actual motion pictures of activities behind the lines, in the trenches and in No Man's Land.
- 88Chicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumChicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumLewis Milestone's powerful 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar novel, starring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim, deserves its reputation as a classic.
- 88ReelViewsJames BerardinelliReelViewsJames BerardinelliAll Quiet on the Western Front is the definitive World War I motion picture, the best of a surprisingly small class of movies.
- 80The New York TimesWalter GoodmanThe New York TimesWalter GoodmanLewis Milestone's unsparing direction of the senseless slaughter more than makes up for the soft spots and does justice to Erich Maria Remarque's novel of a generation destroyed by war.
- 80Time OutTime OutThe film's strength now derives less from its admittedly powerful but highly simplistic utterances about war as waste, than from a generally excellent set of performances (Ayres especially) and an almost total reluctance to follow normal plot structure.