Retrospective appraisal and influence
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 94 reviews. The site's consensus reads: "A documentary-like depiction of a nation's real-life efforts to expel a colonizing force, The Battle of Algiers puts viewers on the front lines with gripping realism." The site ranked it 11th and 12th on their "300 Best Movies of All Time" list in 2024 and 2025, respectively. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 96 out of 100—indicating "universal acclaim"—based on 22 reviews collected since its 2004 re-release.
By the time of the film's 2004 re-release, French reception was much more positive, with most critics accepting the film's aesthetic merits and historic significance as a given. A review in Libération deemed it the "best film ever made about the Algerian war" because it had been "the most credible and the fairest". A notable dissent came from Cahiers du Cinéma, which devoted a special feature to the film comprising five articles by various authors; the magazine's collective editorial denouncement of the film was "cast in such strong terms that it undermined, on moral grounds, the legitimacy of any critic or analyst who did not condemn the film, let alone anyone who dared consider it worthy of filmic attention," though ultimately their disapproval exerted little influence upon the broader French media.
Roger Ebert added the film to his Great Movies series in 2004. The film occupied the 48th place on the Critics' Top 250 Films of Sight and Sound's 2012 poll of the greatest films of all time, as well as 120th place on Empire magazine's list of the 500 greatest movies of all time. In 2010, Empire ranked the movie 6th in its list of the 100 Best Films of World Cinema. It was selected to enter the list of the "100 Italian films to be saved". In 2007, the film was ranked fifth in The Guardian's readers' poll listing the 40 greatest foreign films of all time.
The Battle of Algiers has influenced numerous filmmakers. The American film director Stanley Kubrick praised the film's artistry in an interview with the French magazine Positif: "All films are, in a sense, false documentaries. One tries to approach reality as much as possible, only it's not reality. There are people who do very clever things, which have completely fascinated and fooled me. For example, The Battle of Algiers. It's very impressive." Also, according to Anthony Frewin, Kubrick's personal assistant, he stated: "When I started work for Stanley in September 1965 he told me that I couldn't really understand what cinema was capable of without seeing The Battle of Algiers. He was still enthusing about it prior to his death." The Greek-French political filmmaker Costa-Gavras cited the film as an influence on his filmmaking. The American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh took inspiration from the film while directing the drug war drama Traffic, noting that it (along with Costa-Gavras's Z) had "that great feeling of things that are caught, instead of staged, which is what we were after." The German filmmaker Werner Herzog admired the film and made it one of the few films designated as required viewing to his film school students. The American filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow named it her favorite movie of all time and praised its unrelenting "metronome of tension".
The film has been cited as an influence on Red Dawn, a 1984 film about a group of American guerrillas resisting a joint Soviet–Latin American invasion, with journalist Andrew Kopkind calling it "the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers". The Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón used The Battle of Algiers as an influence for the dystopian drama Children of Men (2006) as a model for social reconstruction in preparation for production, presenting the film to actor Clive Owen as an example of his vision for the film: "It's meticulous, and the sense of reality is so unique. I remember, the first time I saw it, I swore they were lying when they said that everything was fictional." The American actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck said The Battle of Algiers was a key influence on his film Argo (2012). The British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan has named the film as one of his favorites and has credited it as an influence on his films The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Dunkirk. The Australian filmmaker George Miller named the film as one of his five favorite films. The American filmmaker Jason Hall named the film as one of his five favorite military films. It appears in the action thriller film One Battle After Another, and was cited as an influence by director Paul Thomas Anderson. The film also influenced Andor, with various cinematic parallels including a direct parallel between the Theme of Ali and the song played by the marching band in the first season’s final episode, as they march on a police line.
The film has also received praise from political commentators. The Palestinian-American academic Edward Said (famous for his work Orientalism) praised The Battle of Algiers (along with Pontecorvo's other film, Burn!) as the two films "stand unmatched and unexcelled since they were made in the 60s. Both films together constitute a political and aesthetic standard never again equaled." The British-Pakistani writer and activist Tariq Ali placed The Battle of Algiers in his top 10 films list for the 2012 Sight and Sound poll. In 2023, the progressive American magazine The New Republic ranked it first place on its list of the 100 most significant political films of all time.
