Modern reviews The film has since been widely praised in later decades. On
review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90%, based on 60 reviews, with an
average rating of 9.2/10. In 2001, Daneet Steffens of
Entertainment Weekly wrote that "Klimov alternates the horrors of war with occasional fairy tale-like images; together they imbue the film with an unapologetically disturbing quality that persists long after the credits roll." In 2001,
J. Hoberman of
The Village Voice reviewed
Come and See, writing: Directed for baroque intensity,
Come and See is a robust art film with aspirations to the visionary – not so much graphic as leisurely literal-minded in its representation of mass murder. (The movie has been compared both to ''
Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan'', and it would not be surprising to learn that
Steven Spielberg had screened it before making either of these.) The film's central atrocity is a barbaric circus of blaring music and barking dogs in which a squadron of drunken German soldiers round up and parade the peasants to their fiery doom ... The bit of actual death-camp corpse footage that Klimov uses is doubly disturbing in that it retrospectively diminishes the care with which he orchestrates the town's destruction. For the most part, he prefers to show the
Gorgon as reflected in
Perseus's shield. There are few images more indelible than the sight of young Aleksei Kravchenko's fear-petrified expression. In the same publication in 2009,
Elliott Stein described
Come and See as "a startling mixture of lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare." In 2002, Scott Tobias of
The A.V. Club wrote that Klimov's "impressions are unforgettable: the screaming cacophony of a bombing run broken up by the faint sound of a Mozart fugue, a dark, arid field suddenly lit up by eerily beautiful orange flares, German troops appearing like ghosts out of the heavy morning fog. A product of the
glasnost era,
Come and See is far from a patriotic memorial of Russia's hard-won victory. Instead, it's a chilling reminder of that victory's terrible costs." British magazine
The Word wrote that "
Come and See is widely regarded as the finest war film ever made, though possibly not by
Great Escape fans."
Tim Lott wrote in 2009 that the film "makes
Apocalypse Now look lightweight". In 2006, Geoffrey Macnab of
Sight & Sound wrote: "Klimov's astonishing war movie combines intense lyricism with the kind of violent bloodletting that would make even
Sam Peckinpah pause". On 16 June 2010, Roger Ebert posted a review of
Come and See as part of his "Great Movies" series, describing it as one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead ... The film depicts brutality and is occasionally very realistic, but there's an overlay of muted nightmarish exaggeration ... I must not describe the famous sequence at the end. It must unfold as a surprise for you. It pretends to roll back history. You will see how. It is unutterably depressing, because history can never undo itself, and is with us forever. It also made
Channel 4's list of
50 Films to See Before You Die and was ranked number 24 in
Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. Phil de Semlyen of
Empire has described the work as "Elim Klimov's seriously influential, deeply unsettling Belarusian opus. No film – not
Apocalypse Now, not
Full Metal Jacket – spells out the dehumanizing impact of conflict more vividly, or ferociously ... An impressionist masterpiece and possibly the worst date movie ever." It ranked 154 among critics, and 30 among directors, in the
2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, while it ranked 104 among critics, and 41 among directors, in the
2022 Sight & Sound polls. Klimov did not make any more films after
Come and See. In 2001, Klimov said, "I lost interest in making films ... Everything that was possible I felt I had already done." ==See also==